You cannot download german merchant electricity hourly prices for free. But you can at least download German merchant electricity prices quarterly data. So, I put the German merchant electricity price together with natural gas prices from the World Bank and with Exchange Rates from the FRED database.
How you can Update the German Merchant Electricity Database by Yourself
Once you do this you can quickly update all of the data by pressing a couple of buttons. You can download the file below and it should all work. The link for the free data (that is sometimes updated) and the general link is shown below:
https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/spot-market/kwk-index/kwk-index-download/kwk-index—download/59314
http://cdn.eex.com
Lessons from Historic Analysis of Merchant Electricity Prices
This is ok for the kind of analysis that I often use to demonstrate trends and it shows some really interesting trends in spark spreads and in implied heat rates.
Comments on the Lack of Transparency in German Merchant Electricity Prices
I went to the German electricity market called eex.com to download prices and I discovered that I have to pay for the data!!! Of course I could not do this. This also really stinks because one of the basic objectives of merchant markets is to have transparent prices. Transparent prices can be used by consumers and can be used, transparent prices can be used to prevent bribes for high price contracts, transparent prices can be used by investors to decided what kind of plant to invest in, transparent prices can be used by consumers in deciding whether to lock into long-term contracts, transparent prices can be used by consumers to evaluate the benefits of demand response, and on and on and on.