Alberta’s weighted average Power Pool price for February settled at $107.26/MWh, a slight decrease of $6.53/MWh or 5.7% relative to last week. To round out the end of the month, pricing from the 24th to 28th averaged $77.36/MWh, which helped to suppress the monthly price. Demand levels remained flat in the province and, while there were several intermittent generator outages, most of them only occurred for a few hours. Multi-day outages took place at Battle River 4 & 5 and Sundance 6, with only Battle River 4 & 5 remaining offline. Wind generation averaged 60-80% of its maximum capacity in the province, which helped to prevent volatility during elevated periods of demand.
The weighted average Hourly Ontario Energy Price (HOEP) is settling at 4.2¢/kWh so far for the month of March, representing a 0.1¢/kWh or 2.4% increase over last month’s settle. The primary driver of this slight uptick in price is the increased use of expensive natural gas-burning demand response generators. Natural gas-generated supply increased by 57.9% (3,746MW) over the course of this past week, while nuclear and hydro baseload generation both decreased week-over-week (-5.6%; 9,164MW, and -4.3%; 3,857MW, respectively). Solar increased output this past week, climbing 9.4% to 62MW, whereas wind and biofuel generation dropped (-36.4%; -1437MW, and -18.1%; -33MW, respectively). With the first Global Adjustment estimated at 5.5¢/kWh, March’s total market price is settling at 9.7¢/kWh as of today.
– Mark Ljuckanov, Energy Advisor / Ryan Cosgrove, Energy Data Analyst
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