It has been a fortnight of contrasts between the short-term and Annual power curves – Annual power prices have increased in line with sentiment from coal and oil, whilst the day and month-ahead indices have been a lot more steady than seen at the start of July. Short-term has benefitted from generation coming back online (post-nuclear maintenance) and also from healthy wind output. Gas short term has been a lot more volatile due to an extended unscheduled outage at Norway’s Kollsnes processing facility.

At the time of writing, it seems that the market upturn has slowed and started to decline, as the OPEC driven oil increases have steadied off – on the one hand there is the Saudi commitment to reduce exports in September, but there are reports that other countries (Iraq and Libya) are upping their own output. Hence the knock on upward pressure on gas is limited.

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