Daily guide · AL · 2026-09-08
Charging an EV in Albania this week: what the prices actually said
All numbers computed from the week's published auction results at publication and frozen — this article is an honest snapshot, not a page that rewrites itself. Reproduce via the API.
The clearest signal this week is the gap between daytime and evening prices. Across the six days, the cheapest charging window averaged 110,05 EUR/MWh, while the evening peak averaged 247,75 EUR/MWh. That is a 56 percent difference, and it held consistently rather than appearing on a single outlier day.
The cheap window did not sit at a fixed hour. It opened as early as 08:00 on 4 September and as late as 14:00 on 6 September, which is also where the lowest window average landed at 40,33 EUR/MWh. Evening peaks were their steepest on 2 September at 333,33 EUR/MWh. For an EV driver this means the daytime slot is reliably cheaper, but the exact hour worth targeting shifts from day to day, so it pays to check rather than assume.
The concrete takeaway: charging during the identified daytime window instead of the evening peak saves about 20,65 EUR a week on 150 kWh, which scales to roughly 1.074 EUR over a year. If you can shift most of your charging out of the evening, that is the number worth acting on.
Every day at 13:00 CET, an auction sets electricity prices for every hour of tomorrow — separately, for each European bidding zone. Those prices routinely differ by a factor of two to three within a single day, because solar floods the middle of the day and demand peaks in the evening. If you charge an EV, that spread is money: the car doesn't care when it charges, only that it's full by morning. This is what the spread looked like in AL this week.
56%
cheaper to charge in the best 3h window than at the evening peak, on average this week
110.05 vs 247.75
€/MWh: best window vs 18–21h evening habit (week average)
≈€1074
a year on the wholesale component, for 150 kWh/week of charging at this week's gap
Day by day: when the cheap window actually fell
| Day | Cheapest 3h window | Window avg €/MWh | Evening 18–21h | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-02 | 10:00–13:00 | 136 | 333.33 | −59% |
| 2026-09-03 | 10:00–13:00 | 136 | 208.56 | −35% |
| 2026-09-04 | 08:00–11:00 | 136 | 256.67 | −47% |
| 2026-09-05 | 12:00–15:00 | 91.96 | 247.33 | −63% |
| 2026-09-06 | 14:00–17:00 | 40.33 | 193 | −79% |
| 2026-09-07 | 09:00–12:00 | 120 | 247.59 | −52% |
Local time. Notice the window MOVES — sometimes after midnight, sometimes midday when solar peaks. A fixed night tariff catches some of this; following the auction catches all of it.
Automate it in ten minutes
You don't need to read auction results at 13:00 every day — ask the API for the cheapest window and let your wallbox follow it. One call:
curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"zone":"AL","duration_minutes":180,
"objective":"balanced",
"tariff":{"grid_fee_eur_kwh":0.10,
"supplier_markup_eur_kwh":0.02,
"vat_percent":25}}' \
https://voltcast.com/api/v1/optimize/cheapest-window
Home Assistant users: the Voltcast integration
exposes the recommended-window timestamp plus charge_now and
negative_price_incoming; evcc users get a ready-made tariff config.
Enter the variable grid fee, supplier markup and VAT from your bill for cost context.
Optional carbon/balanced modes are experimental trailing historical production-profile
heuristics—not weather-conditioned forecasts or emissions claims. The
Home plan (€9/mo) covers one
zone of your choice with 7-day forecasts, these action signals and the battery simulator;
public pages and widgets let you inspect the data before subscribing.
And if you want to charge on a forecast of tomorrow before the auction even publishes, that's the
P50 curve — scored publicly every day so you know exactly
how much to trust it.
Method & citation. Prices are hourly means of published day-ahead auction results (native 15-minute periods averaged; ENTSO-E/SMARD, attributed). Wholesale-price component only — grid fees and taxes come on top and vary by supplier. Cite as "Voltcast Research, voltcast.com/guides/ev-charging-al-2026-09-08".
Next issue 2 Oct
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