Alberta’s weighted average Power Pool price for September is currently $104.54/MWh. Relative to last week’s price of $85.54/MWh, this represents an increase of $19/MWh or 18.2%. There have been a few periods of volatility over the past week, notably on the 9th when prices settled to $247.78/MWh. This price spike coincided with average hourly demands of 9,216MW, the highest they’ve been relative to this month’s average of 8,990MW, a difference of 226MW or 2.5%. Also contributing to the elevated periods of volatility has been a decrease in renewable generation availability. Furthermore, multi-day generator outages occurred at Keephills 3 and Sundance 4, which began on September 10th and 12th, respectively. In addition, a recent outage at HR Milner occurred on the 15th. The impact to the provincial supply cushion of these three generators combined is a maximum capacity of 1,077MW.
The weighted average Hourly Ontario Energy Price (HOEP) settled at 3.3¢/kWh for the first half of September, an increase of 0.1¢/kWh or 3% compared to the first week’s average price. Although demand and supply both increased 1% compared to last week’s average levels, this slight uptick in price is caused by a shift in the generation mix. Nuclear and hydro-based generation both decreased their baseload by 1% (9,995MW; 3,153MW) and, to compensate for this drop, natural gas increased its supply by 2% (928MW). Both solar and biofuel decreased their supply (-10%, 89MW; -19%, 46MW), with wind picking up the renewable baseload (+16%, 1,340MW) to counteract the small decreases. With the first Global Adjustment estimated at 5.0¢/kWh and the first estimate recovery rate at 0.5¢/kWh, September’s total market price is currently 8.8¢/kWh.
– Mark Ljuckanov, Energy Advisor / Ryan Cosgrove, Energy Data Analyst
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