The new year’s colder weather combined with a reduced contribution from renewable power sources such as wind and solar, conventional plant unavailability and new post-Brexit trading arrangements resulted in tight margins in several electricity markets such as GB and France.
A new ancillary service procured by National Grid to manage the frequency of Britain’s electricity system is set to support the country’s green energy transition and provide new opportunities for battery projects - Dynamic Containment.
GB’s power market is set for radical change as its interconnectivity will more than double in the next three years despite Brexit and other various barriers. Power markets do not sit alone in isolation. Great Britain’s power market is connected into several countries.
Negative power prices have swept across Europe in the first nine months of 2020, with excess power in the market resulting in consumers being paid rather than charged to use electricity. European countries on average saw negative day ahead prices almost 1% of the time.
National Grid updates the electricity and gas markets annually with its new Future Energy Scenarios and this year’s edition sees a significant shift as it has been adjusted to accommodate Net Zero 2050 targets within three of the four offered scenarios.
In the first six months of this year, generation from this power source across Europe amounted to 68TWh – up from the 59TWh in the corresponding period in 2019 and 70% higher than the 2015 figure of 40TWh. In the second quarter of 2020, solar output hit a record 47.6TWh.
The report looked at the value of imports and exports in Europe during the first six months of this year. It found that Sweden’s total net exports amounted to 14.3 TWh with most of the power flowing to Finland (9 TWh) and Lithuania (2.6 TWh).
Britain has overtaken Spain to become the second highest producer of wind generation in Europe. The data looked at levels of European wind generation in the first 23 weeks of 2020 and found that Britain ranked second after Germany during the period.
Today just before 6AM, Great Britain broke the record for the longest period of electricity generation without coal. The new record set today is due to a reduction in the size of the available generation fleet and low demand due to the coronavirus pricing coal out of the market.
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