(Montel) Day-ahead and weekend prices are rising on Thursday morning as forecasts showed wind power production is set to fall and due to outages at conventional power plants, players told Montel.
The day-ahead baseload contract last changed hands at EUR 33.50/MWh at one broker, up by EUR 0.50 on the day, and almost EUR 5 higher than the current Phelix spot settlement, at EUR 28.70/MWh.
Meanwhile, the equivalent contract for the weekend traded up EUR 0.40 at EUR 26/MWh.
“Prices are rising now because renewables forecasts have been revised slightly lower and because expectations for German lignite plant availability for tomorrow have fallen by 700-800 MW from yesterday,” said analyst Sigurd Lie at Oslo-based analysis firm Nena.
A Germany-based trader shared a similar view, adding there was still some upside for the weekend contract “because it seems like there will be almost no wind on Saturday”.
Vattenfall has delayed the planned restart of its Lippendorf R lignite-fired power plant (891 MW) to Saturday at 00:00 CET, while RWE plans to take its lignite unit Neurath D (601 MW) offline from Saturday at 02:00 until Monday at 06:00, Montel reported earlier.
Windy summer
Wind power production is forecast to drop from an average of more than 20 GW throughout the day on Thursday to 11 GW on Friday and further to just 1.3 GW on Saturday, before rising again to almost 5 GW on Sunday and to nearly 18 GW by Thursday next week, Nena data showed.
Wind power generation in Germany has been unusually high so far this summer, with output exceeding 20 GW on a total of three days since 1 June, and at more than 10 GW for a total of 19 days, EEX transparency data showed.
In comparison, wind production never exceeded 10 GW in both July 2013 and 2014, and remained below 14 GW in June 2014 and below 17 GW in June 2013.
Prices for next week also edged higher, with the week-ahead baseload contract last seen up by EUR 0.25 on the day, at EUR 30.75/MWh, largely due to a downward revision in wind forecasts for the first half of the week, the trader said.
Further out, the benchmark Cal 16 baseload contract was last seen up EUR 0.05 at EUR 31.80/MWh.