Alberta’s weighted average Power Pool Price for February is currently $79.46/MWh. Relative to January’s month-end price of $127.56/MWh, this represents a decrease of $48.10/MWh or 37.7%. While pricing throughout the month has experienced some volatility, year-to-date pricing has been much more stable compared to 2022. So far this month, the highest daily settles have been $132.17/MWh and $129.31/MWh on the 1st and 8th, respectively. If we were to omit these two days of volatility, the monthly market price would drop to $62.01/MWh, with daily prices dropping to as low as $45.69/MWh on the 4th. Hourly demands have remained relatively flat, alongside mild seasonal temperatures. In fact, temperatures over the past week remained above 0°C. The only key generator outage this week was Path 83 (Montana intertie), which went offline on the 7th; this impacted yesterday’s pricing and may result in slightly higher short-term hourly prices until it returns to service.
The weighted average Hourly Ontario Energy Price (HOEP) is settling at 2.5¢/kWh so far for the month of February, representing a 0.7¢/kWh or 28.3% 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-burning supply increased by 29.7% (2043MW) over the course of this past week. Baseload generation, such as nuclear, lowered its output to an average of 9944MW, a 45.6MW or 0.5% decrease compared to last week. Hydro-based generation, on the other hand, improved output, climbing 3.4% to an average of 4554MW. Wind and solar decreased week-over-week output (-13.1%; 2386MW, -3.6%; 51MW, respectively), whereas biofuel-burning generation increased supply (+16.1%, +44MW). With the first Global Adjustment estimated at 6.3¢/kWh, February’s total market price is settling at 8.8¢/kWh as of today.
– Mark Ljuckanov, Energy Advisor / Clara Birch, Energy Data Analyst
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