How electricity is bought, sold and priced in Denmark

Electricity is a very strange product. You cannot see it, you cannot easily store it, and it has to be produced at the same instant it is used. If Denmark uses 4 000 megawatts right now, then power plants and wind farms must be producing exactly 4 000 megawatts right now — not a minute earlier, not a minute later.

So somebody has to decide, continuously, which power plants run and which stay off, and what everyone gets paid. Denmark does not use a government plan for this. It uses a market — mostly one big auction, held every day at noon, for the electricity of the following day. This explainer walks through that auction, the smaller markets that come after it, and everything that is added on top before the price reaches you.

The cast: who is who

Six different actors are involved in getting one kilowatt-hour to your home. It helps to keep them apart, because you pay several of them separately on the same bill.

Who is allowed to bid — and from where?

Not everybody can trade on Nord Pool. A company must first become a member: sign the rulebook, pass a credit check, put up collateral (money as security), and take on balance responsibility — a promise that it will produce or consume as much as it has bought, and pay for any difference. Around 400 companies from about 20 countries are members.

The bidders are:

• Producers — offering to sell electricity.
• Suppliers — buying on behalf of all their household and business customers.
• Traders — buying and selling to earn money on price differences.
• Very large consumers — a factory can join the market and buy directly.

Bids are sent electronically from the company's trading desk, which can be anywhere. The location of the office is irrelevant — but every bid must say which price zone it belongs to (DK1, DK2, SE3, DE-LU and so on), because that is where the electricity will physically be produced or consumed.

Units, and how to read a price

The market trades in euro per megawatt-hour (€/MWh). Your bill is in øre per kilowatt-hour. One megawatt-hour is 1 000 kilowatt-hours, and one euro is roughly 7.5 kroner, so:

100 €/MWh ≈ 75 øre/kWh  ·  40 €/MWh ≈ 30 øre/kWh

Market 1 — the day-ahead auction (the "spot market")

This is the main event, and it is where the price you see in the news comes from. It is a single, once-a-day auction that decides the price of essentially all electricity used in Denmark tomorrow.

One more thing happens before the auction: at 10:00 CET the transmission system operators publish how much capacity is available on each cable between zones. That number is an input to the auction — it tells the algorithm how much electricity may flow from one country to another.

How the auction turns thousands of bids into one price

The algorithm does something surprisingly simple, and you could do it by hand with a class of 30 students.

1. Sort all sell offers from cheapest to most expensive. This staircase is called the merit order. Wind turbines and solar panels sit at the bottom, because once they are built the wind and the sunshine are free — running them for one more hour costs almost nothing. Then come waste and biomass plants, then gas turbines, which must buy expensive fuel for every kilowatt-hour.
2. Sort all buy bids from the highest price down. Most consumption is not very price-sensitive — a hospital needs power whatever it costs — so the demand line is almost vertical.
3. Find the crossing point. That is the price, and the volume, for that quarter-hour.
4. Everybody trades at that same price. A wind farm that offered to sell at 0 €/MWh still receives the full clearing price. This is called pay-as-cleared, or marginal pricing.

Why prices can be negative

On a very windy night, demand is low and the turbines could produce more than the country can use. Some producers still prefer to keep running rather than shut down — because of subsidy schemes, or simply because stopping and restarting a plant costs money. They then offer at a negative price, meaning they are willing to pay to be allowed to deliver. If enough of them do, the market price for that quarter-hour goes below zero.

Market 2 — intraday: correcting the plan

The day-ahead auction closes at 12:00, and the electricity it prices is used the following day. So the gap between deciding and delivering is a range: the first quarter-hour of the delivery day starts at midnight, 12 hours after the gate closed, and the last one ends at midnight the night after, 36 hours after it closed. Everything in that window has to be planned in advance.

In between, reality moves: the wind forecast is revised, a power plant trips, a cold front arrives earlier than expected, a factory shuts down for the afternoon.

A wind forecast made 30 hours ahead is typically several per cent off. A forecast made one hour ahead is far better. The intraday market exists so that companies can act on that better information instead of being stuck with what they bought at noon.

Two ways to trade intraday

Continuous trading works like a stock exchange. Companies put offers into a shared order book — "I sell 5 MW for the quarter-hour 19:00–19:15 at 82 €/MWh" — and the offer sits there until somebody accepts it. There is no single algorithm and no single price: each deal is struck at the price of the order that was accepted, which traders call pay-as-bid. Key facts:

• Opens at 14:00 CET, immediately after the day-ahead results.
• Products are quarter-hours, whole hours, and blocks of several periods.
• Trading is in euro only.
• In Denmark, trading in a given period stops 60 minutes before that period begins. (The rule differs by country — in Finland it runs right up to delivery.)
• Capacity on the cables between countries is used up as trades happen: first come, first served.

Three intraday auctions run alongside the continuous market. They are ordinary auctions, exactly like the day-ahead one — all bids collected, one clearing price per zone per quarter-hour:

The auctions do one thing the continuous market cannot: they collect all the interest at a single moment, which produces a clear reference price — and they hand out cross-border cable capacity that continuous trading has left unused.

How the two fit together

This is the part that confuses almost everybody, so let us be precise about it.

They are not alternatives, and nobody chooses between them. Both belong to the same European system, SIDC — the Single Intraday Coupling, which links the intraday markets of around 25 countries. Both are available in every participating bidding zone, Denmark included, for the same delivery periods, to the same participants. It is not a national decision and not a zone-level decision: an individual trader decides, deal by deal, whether to hit an offer in the order book right now or wait and put an order into the next auction. Most intraday volume still goes through continuous trading; the auctions add a clear common price three times a day.

They do interact in one place: the cables. Cross-border capacity is a single physical thing, and it cannot be sold twice. The two markets hand it out in completely different ways:

• Continuous trading gives capacity away first come, first served, at no charge. Whoever trades first gets to use the cable.
• The auctions price it. Because all orders are collected at once, the auction can work out how much the capacity is really worth and allocate it to whoever values it most — exactly as the day-ahead auction does.

Since the same capacity cannot be allocated by both mechanisms simultaneously, cross-border trading in the continuous market is paused around each auction — from roughly 20 minutes before the gate closes until the results are out, some 40 minutes in total. Trading inside a bidding zone keeps running the whole time. As soon as the auction is done, any capacity it did not use flows straight back into continuous trading.

That pricing of cross-border capacity is the whole reason the auctions were introduced, in June 2024, following a decision by the EU energy regulators' agency ACER. European rules deliberately keep both mechanisms alive side by side: the auctions for good price signals and fair allocation of scarce capacity, continuous trading for speed and last-minute corrections.

What countries actually do decide

A country cannot choose to have one market and not the other. What its TSO does set are the local details:

• How late you may trade. Denmark closes 60 minutes before the delivery period; Finland lets trading run right up to delivery; Estonia and Latvia stop 30 minutes before.
• Which products are offered — quarter-hours, hours, blocks — and, historically, the time resolution of the zone.
• How much cross-border capacity is released, and until when. Today it is generally available up to about an hour before delivery, and the plan is to shorten that.

Who trades there, and why

• Wind and solar operators who sold more yesterday than the weather will now deliver, and must buy the difference back.
• Suppliers whose customers turn out to need more or less than forecast.
• Flexible producers and batteries, which can start, stop or discharge at short notice and sell into a suddenly tight quarter-hour.
• Traders, who provide liquidity and profit from the difference between the day-ahead price and the intraday price.

Intraday prices can end up far above or far below the day-ahead price for the very same quarter-hour, because they carry newer information. They are also more jumpy: far fewer bids are in play, so a single large trade moves the price more than it would in the big noon auction.

How intraday affects your bill

Here is the honest answer for a household: the intraday price never appears on your bill. If you have a spot-price contract, you are settled on the day-ahead price for each hour or quarter-hour. Nothing your supplier does in the intraday market changes that number.

You still pay for it, though, in three indirect ways.

1. Through the supplier's mark-up. Buying late is usually more expensive than buying at noon. Those costs, plus the imbalance costs that remain, are covered by the mark-up of a few øre per kilowatt-hour and by the monthly subscription. A supplier that forecasts its customers well can charge a lower mark-up than one that forecasts badly — which is a genuine reason why retail offers differ.
2. Through the risk premium on fixed-price contracts. If you fix your price for a year, the supplier carries every forecast error for that year and prices that risk in.
3. Through the tariffs, for everybody. Every megawatt-hour that companies sort out between themselves in the intraday market is one that Energinet does not have to buy in the balancing market. Less balancing means lower system costs — and the system tariff is exactly where those costs are collected.

For a large factory the story is different. If it is balance responsible for itself, it trades intraday directly and pays those prices in full — and it can also earn money there: when the intraday price spikes, pausing a furnace and selling the power it had already bought can be worth more than the production it postpones. Batteries and aggregators that bundle thousands of homes, EV chargers and heat pumps do exactly the same thing on a smaller scale.

Scale check: intraday trading typically handles only a few per cent of total consumption, against roughly 90 % or more for the day-ahead auction. Its importance is not its size — it is that it lets a wind-heavy system correct itself cheaply.

Market 3 — balancing, the final seconds (this one is not Nord Pool)

Whatever intraday trading could not fix ends up here. Even after the last intraday deal, reality never matches the plan exactly. In the last minutes, and during delivery itself, Energinet takes over. It runs its own markets:

• Reserves (FCR, aFRR, mFRR): power plants, batteries and large flexible consumers are paid to stand ready to increase or reduce output within seconds or minutes.
• Balancing energy: Energinet activates the cheapest available reserve when the system drifts, and
• Imbalance settlement: any company that used or produced more or less than it bought pays — or is paid — the balancing price for each 15-minute period.

This is why balance responsibility matters, and it is where batteries and flexible industry earn much of their income.

There is also a purely financial market (futures on Nasdaq) where companies lock in a price years ahead. No electricity is ever delivered there — it is insurance against price swings, not a spot market.

Price zones — and what actually sets the DK1 price

Europe is divided into bidding zones. A zone is an area which the market treats as having one common price. Denmark has two: DK1 (Jutland and Funen) and DK2 (Zealand and the islands), split because the connection across the Great Belt is limited. Norway has five zones, Sweden four, Germany is one single zone.

Step by step: how the DK1 price is found

1. Every zone builds its own supply staircase and demand line from the bids submitted in that zone.
2. The algorithm would like every zone to have the same price, because that means the cheapest power stations in Europe are the ones running.
3. So it sends electricity from cheap zones to expensive ones. Each megawatt exported from DK1 is added to DK1's demand and to the neighbour's supply, which pushes the DK1 price up and the neighbour's price down.
4. It keeps doing this until either the two prices meet — or the cable reaches its physical limit.
5. If the cable is full, the prices stay different. That is called congestion. The price gap multiplied by the flow is real money, collected by the two grid operators. Energinet uses this congestion income to reduce the tariffs Danish consumers pay — one reason Energinet's 2026 tariff fell by about 15 %.

So the DK1 price is not decided by Danish wind alone. It is decided by Danish wind plus the price in Norway, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain, and by how much room is left on the cables.

Inside DK1 there is only one price

A wind farm in Thy, a school in Aarhus, a factory in Esbjerg and a flat in Odense all face exactly the same market price in the same quarter-hour. The market model assumes the zone has no internal limits — engineers call this a copper plate assumption.

Reality is not quite a copper plate. Sometimes an internal line in Jutland cannot carry what the market wants to send through it. The market does not price this; Energinet fixes it after the auction by paying one plant to produce a bit less and another to produce a bit more (redispatch, or special regulation). The cost is later collected through the grid tariffs, shared by everybody.

From the market price to your bill: the five layers

The market price is only one part of what you pay. Here are all the layers, with 2026 numbers for a household in DK1. Everything is per kilowatt-hour unless stated.

Layer 1 — the electricity itself (competitive)

Either the spot price for that period, or a fixed price if you signed such a contract. Your supplier adds a mark-up (typically 0–8 øre/kWh) and usually a monthly subscription of 15–30 kroner. This is the only part you can shop around for.

Layer 2 — the distribution tariff (DSO, regulated monopoly)

Paid to your local grid company for transport through the local network, from 60 kV down to the 400 volts in your wall, and for your meter. Since 2023 almost all Danish grid companies use Tarifmodel 3.0, which splits the day into three periods and the year into two seasons:

• 00–06 lavlast — low load, cheapest
• 06–17 and 21–24 højlast — high load
• 17–21 spidslast — peak load, most expensive
• Winter (October–March) rates are higher than summer (April–September) rates

The reason is physical: the grid has to be built big enough for the single worst hour of the year. If everybody charges their car at 18:00 in January, the grid company must build thicker cables for everybody. The tariff is a signal that says: please don't.

Layer 3 — the transmission and system tariffs (TSO, regulated monopoly)

Paid to Energinet, the same for every consumer in the country, and the same at every hour of the day:

• Transmission (net) tariff — 4.3 øre/kWh: the high-voltage grid, its masts, cables and transformers.
• System tariff — 7.2 øre/kWh: operating the system, security of supply, reserves, and the national metering database (DataHub).
• System subscription — 187 kr. per year per metering point.

Together that is 11.5 øre/kWh in 2026, about 15 % lower than in 2025, partly because Energinet is handing back the congestion income described above.

Layer 4 — the electricity tax (the state)

This is the layer that has changed most dramatically. For years the Danish electricity tax was around 70–90 øre/kWh — often the single largest item on a household bill. For 2026 and 2027 the Danish parliament cut it to the EU minimum of 0.8 øre/kWh. Without that decision it would have been about 72.7 øre/kWh. (The old PSO tariff, which financed renewable subsidies, was phased out of electricity bills back in 2022 and is now paid over the state budget.)

Layer 5 — VAT, 25 %

Added on top of the sum of everything above — yes, including on top of the other taxes. Households pay it. Businesses registered for VAT deduct it, so for them it is not a cost.

One day, hour by hour

Two things move during the day, and they move together. The market price rises when everybody is awake and cooking, and the grid tariff is highest in exactly the same hours. The result is a price difference of a factor of four between the cheapest and the most expensive hour.

Want a real, named day instead? Both datasets behind this figure are free and open, and the download pack includes a script that redraws it for any date you choose — see real-day/README.md. Pick a winter weekday, and remember to use the tax and tariff rates that applied in that year.

Price and CO₂: two numbers that move together

Here is something the market does almost by accident. The hours when electricity is expensive are usually the hours when it is dirty, and the hours when it is cheap are usually the hours when it is clean. That is not a coincidence — it follows directly from how the auction works.

Remember Figure 3: the last plant needed sets the price. When wind and sun cover most of the demand, that last plant is something cheap and clean, and the price is low. When the wind drops, the last plant is a gas turbine — which sets a high price and emits roughly 350 grams of CO₂ for every kilowatt-hour it produces. The same plant drives both numbers.

You are already paying for CO₂ — you just cannot see it on the bill

Power stations in Europe must buy an allowance for every tonne of CO₂ they emit, under the EU Emissions Trading System. In 2026 an allowance costs roughly €70–80 per tonne. A gas plant that emits about 0.35 tonnes per MWh therefore carries a carbon cost of around 26 €/MWh, or about 20 øre per kWh, before it has paid for any gas at all. A coal plant, at roughly 0.9 tonnes per MWh, carries about three times that.

That cost goes straight into the offer the plant makes in the auction. So in every hour where a fossil plant sets the price, a slice of the market price you pay is the carbon price — even though no line on your bill ever says "CO₂". It is also why the carbon price changes the merit order: as it rises, coal is pushed above gas in the staircase, and both are pushed above renewables.

Why the link is not perfect

Price is a good proxy for carbon, never a measurement of it. Three things break the pattern:

• Imports. Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear are clean, but not always cheap. In a dry year, an expensive hour in DK1 can be an hour of clean imported power.
• Heat. Some Danish plants run because a town needs district heating, not because the electricity price is attractive.
• Accounting. Biomass and waste are counted very differently from coal and gas, and different methods (production-based, consumption-based, marginal) give different answers for the same hour.

Denmark's average electricity is now quite clean — on the order of 80–120 g CO₂ per kWh in recent years — but that average hides enormous variation. Individual hours run from close to zero to 400–500 g per kWh. Averages are what you report; hours are what you can actually act on.

Why this matters to you

• Households. Shifting the car charger, the dishwasher or the heat pump into the cheap hours normally moves it into the clean hours too. On the day in Figure 11, charging a 60 kWh car battery at 03:00 rather than 18:00 saves both money and roughly 20 kg of CO₂ — one charge. The same habit, every week, is a few hundred kilos a year.
• Businesses. Companies must report the emissions from the electricity they buy. Energinet publishes an hour-by-hour environmental declaration for DK1 and DK2, so a firm that can move its consumption can genuinely lower its reported footprint — not just buy a certificate.
• Anyone buying "green electricity". A guarantee of origin says that somewhere, at some time in the year, an equivalent amount of renewable electricity was produced. It does not change which plant ran during your evening peak. That is why "hourly matching" — proving your consumption was clean in the same hour it happened — is becoming the stricter standard.
• Industry with flexibility. The same flexibility that earns money in the intraday and balancing markets also cuts emissions, because it moves consumption away from the hours when fossil plants are on the margin.

All the underlying data is public and free: Energinet publishes the CO₂ content of every hour through Energi Data Service, and several Danish electricity apps now display price and carbon side by side.

Want a real, named day instead? Both datasets behind this figure are free and open, and the download pack includes a script that redraws it for any date you choose — see real-day/README.md. Pick a winter weekday, and remember to use the tax and tariff rates that applied in that year.

Households, businesses and industry — same market, different bill

An important thing first: the wholesale price is identical for all of them. A factory in Esbjerg and a flat in Odense face the same DK1 price in the same quarter-hour. Everything that differs comes after the market.

1. Transport costs fall as you climb the voltage ladder

In the example grid company used above, the winter daytime tariff is about 21.9 øre/kWh for a household (C), about 8.2 øre for a customer on the B-low level, and under 1 øre for a large A-level customer. This is not a discount for being big — it reflects that a household's electricity has travelled through far more equipment.

2. Big customers also pay for capacity, not just energy

A and B customers pay an additional capacity charge (effektbetaling) in kroner per kilowatt of their highest measured power draw during the year. From 2026 Energinet introduced a similar capacity subscription for consumers connected directly to the transmission grid, replacing a per-kilowatt-hour tariff — deliberately, to make large-scale electrification such as Power-to-X plants and big heat pumps cheaper. Very large consumers, above 100 GWh a year, also qualify for a reduced system tariff.

3. Taxes work differently

• Electricity tax: households pay the full 0.8 øre/kWh in 2026. VAT-registered businesses can reclaim part of it, down to the EU minimum of 0.4 øre/kWh. Before 2026, when the tax was above 70 øre, this refund was one of the biggest differences between a home and a business.
• VAT: households pay 25 % and cannot get it back. Businesses deduct it entirely.

4. They buy in different ways

• Households choose between a spot-price contract (the price follows Nord Pool hour by hour) and a fixed-price contract (the supplier takes the risk and charges a premium for it).
• Small and medium businesses do much the same, often with a longer fixed period so they can budget.
• Large industry can go further: hedge with financial contracts, sign a long-term PPA (power purchase agreement) directly with a wind or solar farm, or become a Nord Pool member and trade for itself.

5. Big consumers can sell flexibility back

A factory that can pause a freezer, a furnace or an electrolyser for ten minutes has something Energinet needs. Through the reserve and balancing markets, large consumers — and increasingly aggregators bundling thousands of homes, EV chargers and heat pumps — get paid for being flexible. For a household today this mostly shows up as smart charging that automatically picks the cheapest hours.

Your white goods, and what the energy label really says

All of this market machinery ends in a kitchen. So it is worth knowing what the machines in it actually do with electricity — and how to read the one piece of official information you get when you buy one.

The label: A to G, and one number that changes meaning

Since March 2021 the EU label uses a plain A to G scale for fridges, freezers, washing machines, washer-dryers, dishwashers and televisions; lamps followed in September 2021, and tumble dryers on 1 July 2025. The old A+, A++ and A+++ classes are gone.

This confuses people in shops, so it is worth saying plainly: a washing machine that was A+++ in 2020 is often a C today. The machine did not get worse — the ruler changed. The top classes were deliberately left almost empty so manufacturers have somewhere to climb.

Two things the label does not shout about. First, the number is measured on the eco programme — the long, lukewarm one that few people select. Wash at 60 °C on a fast cycle and you will use considerably more. Second, since 1 July 2025 only heat-pump tumble dryers may be placed on the EU market; they use roughly half of what an old condenser dryer used.

How each machine actually uses electricity

Almost every big number in a kitchen is heat. A washing machine's motor is trivial; what costs money is warming 40 litres of water. A dishwasher is the same story. A tumble dryer heats air and throws it away. An oven heats a steel box. This single fact explains most of the household advice you have ever heard: full loads, lower temperatures, lids on pots.

The fridge is the opposite case: tiny power, enormous hours. It draws about 0.1 kW but never stops, so it quietly outspends the kettle you notice every morning.

What can you actually do with all this?

Everything so far has been description. Here is the part that changes a bill.

Prices and weather answer two different questions

A common shortcut says that once prices are published you can ignore the weather. That is only half true, and the half it gets wrong matters.

It is true for the price question. Tomorrow's prices are published at around 13:00 today, hour by hour; the wind forecast is what the traders used to produce them, so reading it yourself to guess the price is checking the ingredients when the meal is already on the table. And on a spot contract, tomorrow's weather cannot change what you pay tomorrow: your price was fixed at noon today. If the wind dies overnight, your supplier carries that in the intraday and balancing markets, not you.

But the weather answers a different question: how much energy will you need, and how long will your building hold it? Prices say nothing about either. A house is not a passive box — it is a thermal store. Its walls, floors and furniture hold a large amount of heat, so what you do in one hour is still there several hours later. That is what makes pre-heating and pre-cooling possible in the first place, and you cannot plan it from prices alone.

Three pieces of weather actually matter, at different horizons:

• Temperature, next 24 hours and next week. It sets how much heat leaks out (or in), and therefore how long the house coasts. A cold snap raises the price and your demand at the same moment, so the two multiply rather than add. Knowing it is coming lets you pre-heat the building and the hot-water tank during cheap nights.
• Sunshine. On a clear spring day, south-facing windows can heat a Danish living room without any heating at all — so heating hard on a sunny morning wastes energy you were about to be given. If you have solar panels, the cloud forecast also decides whether to charge from the grid tonight or wait for midday.
• Wind, only as a rough signal. Windy means cheap, and it also means a draughty house loses heat faster. Beyond about three days, wind forecasts are too vague to act on.

Summer matters too — and it is growing

Danish homes are built to keep heat in, which is exactly the problem in July. Well-insulated buildings with large windows overheat easily, which is why the building code requires new dwellings to be documented against a limit of roughly 100 hours a year above 27 °C and 25 hours above 28 °C — and why the official guidance names natural ventilation and solar shading as the first remedies, precisely so that mechanical cooling is not needed.

More Danish households now reach for fans, portable air conditioners or a heat pump running in reverse, so summer is becoming an electricity story too. The thermal-store logic simply flips:

• Ventilate at night, close up by day. Even after a 28 °C afternoon, Danish night air is often 13–16 °C. Running that air through the house cools the structure itself, and the building then holds the coolness into the afternoon. This is the cheapest cooling available in Denmark, and it costs nothing but an open window.
• Shade before the sun arrives, not after. Once the sunlight is inside and has warmed the floor, a blind cannot undo it. External shading beats internal blinds for the same reason.
• A fan cools people, not rooms. It moves air across your skin; it does not remove heat from the house, and its motor adds 30–70 W. Useful where you are sitting, useless as a cooling strategy for an empty room.
• Open windows only while it is colder outside than inside. Airing out at 15:00 on a hot day imports heat. This is the one place where a household genuinely needs to compare two temperatures — and where a forecast of tomorrow's peak is worth reading.
• If you do run active cooling, midday is often the cheap hour. Summer solar pushes DK1 prices down in the middle of the day — sometimes below zero. That is the opposite of the winter pattern, and it means a heat pump in cooling mode is frequently running at exactly the right moment anyway.

How far any of this goes depends on the building. A heavy, well-insulated house drifts perhaps half a degree an hour and can genuinely coast through a four-hour peak; a light, poorly insulated flat drifts several times faster and has much less to work with. That is worth measuring at home before assuming it: switch the heating off for two hours on a cold evening and watch the thermometer.

If you have no solar panels, no heat pump and no electric car

This is most Danish flats, and homes on district heating. Your electricity bill is white goods, cooking, lighting and electronics — a few thousand kilowatt-hours a year. Three moves cover almost everything:

1. Know the peak window and stay out of it. Weekday evenings, 17–21, October to March. In the example grid company used in this explainer, that hour costs 66 øre/kWh in distribution alone against 7 øre at night. This is not a forecast you have to follow; it is a published timetable, fixed for the year.
2. Put the three big machines on their timers. Washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer are the only large loads whose timing is genuinely free. Set them once.
3. Use less per cycle. Full loads, eco programme, lower temperature — because the electricity is going into heating water, not into turning the drum.

And the one that is not about electricity at all: on district heating, the thermostat is your main lever, and letting the radiators run slowly rather than blasting them lowers the return temperature — which most Danish district-heating utilities charge you for separately.

If you do have solar, a heat pump, a battery or an electric car

Now the numbers change scale. A car adds around 3 000 kWh a year and a heat pump around 4 000 — each comparable to an entire ordinary household. But both are also flexible: a car sits still for fourteen hours a night, and a well-insulated house holds its heat for hours. That makes them the best-paid flexibility a household can offer.

• Automate rather than watch. A charger or heat pump controller that reads tomorrow's prices at 13:00 and picks its own hours will beat any human checking an app.
• Self-consumption beats export. A kilowatt-hour you use yourself is worth the full retail price you avoid paying — around 1.15 kr. A kilowatt-hour you export earns only the market price, perhaps 0.45 kr. That gap is the whole economics of home batteries.
• Use the building as storage. Heating the house slightly harder in cheap hours and coasting through the expensive ones is thermal storage that costs nothing to install — and in summer, running the heat pump in cooling mode around midday, when solar has pushed the price down.
• Don't all start at 02:00. If every automated home in DK1 starts at the same second, that hour stops being the cheap one. Good controllers spread their start times.

Who does any of this actually help?

It is worth being precise, because the four parties want subtly different things — and because the answer explains why the tariffs are shaped the way they are.

• You want the lowest bill, which means fewer kilowatt-hours and cheaper ones.
• Your supplier wants your consumption to be predictable. Its costs come from forecast error — the intraday and imbalance costs of Section 5. A customer who behaves regularly is a cheap customer to serve, and that shows up in the mark-up the market can sustain.
• Your DSO wants a lower peak. It must build cables for the worst hour of the year, not the average one. Every household that stays out of 17–21 postpones a reinforcement that everyone would otherwise pay for through the tariff. This is the entire logic of Tarifmodel 3.0.
• Energinet wants demand to follow production — to sit where the wind is — and to buy as little balancing power as possible.
• The climate wants consumption in the hours when nothing is burning, which is usually, though not always, the cheap hours.

The useful thing is how much these overlap. Moving the dishwasher out of the winter evening helps you, your supplier, your grid company, Energinet and the climate at once — which is not a coincidence but the entire point of pricing electricity by the hour.

Seven things worth remembering

1. One auction, closing at 12:00 each day, sets 96 prices for tomorrow — one for every quarter-hour — and the results appear around 12:45.
2. The last accepted offer sets the price, and everyone trades at that price. That is why cheap wind power earns the gas price on a calm evening.
3. Denmark has two price zones. Inside a zone the price is the same everywhere; between zones it differs only when the connecting cable is full.
4. Your bill has five layers: energy, distribution, transmission and system, tax, VAT. Only the first one is set by the market, and only the first one can you shop around for.
5. Time matters more than ever. The market price and the grid tariff both peak between 17:00 and 21:00 in winter, which is why moving consumption to the night is worth real money.
6. Cheap hours are usually clean hours, because the plant that sets the price is usually the plant that burns something. Moving your consumption saves money and CO₂ at the same time.
7. Prices and weather answer different questions. The price for tomorrow is already published; the weather tells you how much you will need and how long your building will hold it — which is what makes pre-heating in winter and night ventilation in summer work.

Danish words you will meet

Where the numbers come from

Prices and rules change every year. Every section above ends with links to the documents it is built on; the list below gathers the main ones. Everything was checked in 2026 — before reusing any figure, check the current value at the source.

The markets

• Nord Pool — Product Specifications, Nordic/Baltic Market Area, effective 13 January 2026 (PDF). The single most useful document here: gate closures, 96 delivery periods, price limits, intraday auction times.
• Nord Pool — Day-ahead Market Regulations and Intraday Market Regulations (PDF, September 2025).
• Nord Pool — Day-ahead market and About the Day-Ahead Auction in the Nordics & Baltics.
• Nord Pool — About the SIDC Intraday Auctions and ENTSO-E — Intraday Auctions (IDA).
• Nord Pool — 15-minute MTU implemented in SDAC (delivery day 1 October 2025) and the transition page.

Tariffs and taxes

• Energinet — Tariffer og gebyrer, and the press release on the 2026 tariffs (4.3 + 7.2 øre/kWh, 187 kr./year, the new capacity model).
• Skattestyrelsen — temporary reduction of the electricity tax for 2026–2027 and Skatteministeriet's rate list.
• Nord Energi Net — tariffs and subscriptions 2026 (PDF) for the A/B/C examples, and N1 for the time bands. All Danish grid companies' tariffs are published in Energi Data Service.

Live data you can use in class

• Nord Pool — day-ahead prices: today's and tomorrow's prices for DK1 and DK2.
• Energi Data Service — CO2 Emission: the carbon content of Danish electricity, hour by hour, free API.
• ENTSO-E Transparency Platform: the same data for every European bidding zone.
• Sandbag — carbon price viewer: the EU ETS allowance price.