The recent cold weather resulted in gas system stresses and correlated spikes in gas commodity prices. These flowed through to the power market where peaking plant called on by the System Operator to manage the electricity system resulted in System Imbalance Prices (SIP) hitting £990/MWh on 1 March.
Since November 2015 and the implementation of P305 the SIP calculation has become more marginal. Ed Reed explores how these changes coupled with declining levels of large baseload plant and rising levels of smaller intermittent plant are leading to greater SIP volatility.