Britain’s power traders are facing dips in wind and nuclear power that are set to tighten the country’s grid, but mild weather will ease the strain.
Only a small proportion of the country’s installed wind turbine capacity of 28 gigawatts will be blowing on Sunday and Monday.
At the same time, outages at nuclear stations — which usually constitute about 14% of the power mix — will leave the country even more dependent on gas.
The UK’s energy crisis has largely eased, with the grid operator yet to call for generation from the reserve coal plants it’s paid almost £400 million ($484 million) to stay online this winter.
While the heating season isn’t over, relatively mild temperatures have eased demand, while lower gas prices have brought down costs.
Output from wind power is set to bottom at 3.3 gigawatts at 6 p.m. on Sunday, before rising to about 6 gigawatts for Monday’s evening peak, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
A 620-megawatt unit at Electricite de France SA’s nuclear reactor in Hartlepool is also set to go down for maintenance on Friday evening until March, adding to existing outages at three other nuclear units.
Together, the four outages total 2.5 gigawatts — about a third of the UK’s total nuclear capacity.
Still, there’s no sudden blast of cold weather facing the market like on the tightest days this winter, which saw balancing prices hit £6,000 per megawatt-hour.
Temperatures are expected to stay above the 30-year normal, averaging about 6 degrees Celsius on Sunday and Monday, according to an ECMWF forecast.
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