About spothours

Last updated 2026-08-18

spothours.com shows what an hour of electricity costs, hour by hour, in six European countries. It exists because the answer to "is now a good time to run the washing machine" is genuinely useful and surprisingly hard to find.

Who makes it

The site is built and maintained by Damian Bazzano. It is an independent project, not affiliated with any energy supplier, network operator, or comparison service. Nobody pays us to recommend a tariff, and we do not sell leads. The site is intended to be funded by advertising, but no ads run on it today. If that changes you will see them, and the privacy policy will say so before you do.

Where the numbers come from

Wholesale prices come from the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform, the official European source published by the transmission system operators themselves. We fetch the day-ahead auction results three times daily, because publication times slip.

Since 1 October 2025 the European day-ahead market has traded in 15-minute intervals rather than hourly ones, so we receive 96 prices per day. We show hourly averages by default, because that is how households are billed and how people think about their day. The quarter-hourly detail is available for anyone who wants it.

Why we show final prices, not just wholesale

A wholesale price of 9 cents per kWh means very little if your bill says 19. The gap is VAT, energy taxes, and grid charges, and it differs in every country we cover. We add those in so the number on screen resembles the number on your bill.

This makes the figure an estimate rather than a fact, and we label it as such everywhere it appears. You can always switch to the raw wholesale price with one tap.

What we get wrong

Grid charges are set by network operators, and most countries have dozens of them. Unless you tell us your own rate, we use a national typical value. In Germany, Sweden and Finland the price page has a field for the variable rate from your own bill, and we recalculate with it. Denmark publishes per-operator tariffs as open data and a per-address lookup is planned; today we apply the national time-banded shape. Spain has a single national tariff and the Netherlands has no per-kWh grid component at all, so neither needs an input.

Tax rules change. Spain altered both VAT and electricity duty twice in the first half of 2026. Denmark cut its electricity tax to the EU minimum for 2026 and 2027, after which it reverts. We track these with dated rules and review them at least annually, but there will be periods where we lag a change.

What is automated and what is not

Being clear about this matters. Price collection is fully automated: a scheduled job fetches the day-ahead auction results three times a day and writes them to a database untouched. The arithmetic that turns a wholesale price into a final estimate is also automated, and you can read exactly what it does on the methodology page.

The words are a different matter, and worth being precise about. The country guides were drafted with AI assistance from official sources. A guide is only credited to a named person once that person has actually read and fact-checked every paragraph in it; until then it carries a visible notice at the top saying it is an unreviewed draft. If a guide does not name a reviewer, nobody has checked it yet, and you should treat its explanations accordingly.

Tax and grid rates are a separate thing from the prose and are handled more strictly: each is entered by hand from an official source, carries that source link and a review date, and is re-checked at least once a year and whenever a reader tells us something has changed.

Corrections

If you spot a figure that looks wrong, please tell us via the contact form. Corrections to tax and grid assumptions are genuinely welcome — a reader who knows their own market usually knows it better than we do.

When a rate turns out to be wrong we change it, note the change and its source on the methodology page, and update the review date. We do not quietly roll the "last updated" date on a page we have not actually changed.