An automated Capacity Market notice was briefly announced for the first time this winter . The notice, issued at 12.05 and cancelled at 14.05, would have taken effect from 16.30.
Capacity Market notices are generated automatically when capacity known to be available to the system operator falls below a set margin above expected demand. It is usually a signal to plant owners to notify the SO of other capacity and make it available.
Montel Analytics noted that this is the first tight day of this winter. It said, “Although we are not into the depths of winter yet these high priced events tend to happen in the shoulder periods as generators and interconnectors time their outages to be outside winter.” Four interconnectors are on planned outages (NSL -1.4GW), are offline (Eleclink and IFA2) or running at 50% (IFA).
Montel added, “NESO has issued a capacity mechanism warning notice due to tight margin but this will be removed as their balancing actions come into effect.” It also said, “When we get into the winter we can expect more conventional generation on-line which should reduce the risk of high prices”.