Alberta’s weighted average Power Pool price for November is currently $101.57/MWh, representing a further increase of $8.47/MWh or 9.1% relative to last week’s price of $93.10/MWh. Pricing has steadily increased over the past couple of weeks, as we head into the colder parts of the year. Hourly demand also continues to rise, with an average this past week of 10,192MW, an increase of 182MW or 1.8%. There were a few extended volatile periods, namely on the 19th when daily pricing averaged $271.86/MWh and reached a high of $827.11/MWh. Decreased wind generation can be partly blamed for the elevation in pricing; whereas previous weeks saw wind generation average over 70% of its capacity, we were down to 15-20% last week. This resulted in lower volumes of cheap renewable generation available to the grid, which had to be replaced with more expensive fossil fuel generation. Intermittent outages at Keephills 2 and 3, as well as Battle River 4 and Sundance 6, also contributed to the uptick in pricing.
The weighted average Hourly Ontario Energy Price (HOEP) settled at 3.9¢/kWh so far this month, representing a 0.1¢/kWh or 2.6% increase over last week’s settle. The primary driver of this price hike is the increased use of demand response generators, which are typically expensive natural gas-burning ones. Natural gas generated supply increased by 2.5% (1,649MW) over the course of this past week, while baseload generation, such as nuclear and hydro, both decreased, lowering their output to an average of 8,688MW (-0.5%) and 3,682MW (-1.0%), respectively. On the flip side, wind and biofuel increased output (+7.6%; 1,921MW, +0.8%; 61MW, respectively).
With the first Global Adjustment estimated at 5.7¢/kWh and the first estimate recovery rate at 0.6¢/kWh, November’s total market price is currently settling at 10.2¢/kWh as of today.
– Mark Ljuckanov, Energy Advisor / Ryan Cosgrove, Energy Data Analyst
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