STRONGER LOAD, NATURAL GAS BOOST NYISO PRICES IN JANUARY
Stronger demand and higher natural gas prices boosted wholesale power prices from December to January in the New York Independent System Operator, but they were not higher than January 2015 prices, stakeholders learned Wednesday.
During a NYISO Management Committee meeting, Rick Gonzales, senior vice president and chief operating officer, presented a report about market performance, which included price and load data.
Real-time load-weighted LMPs averaged $31.80/MWh in January, up from $21.86/MWh in December but down from $50.18/MWh in January 2015, Gonzales said.
Average daily sendout, which represents how much electricity is supplied via the NYISO grid during the course of a day, was 439 GWh in January, up from 408 GWh in December but down from 462 GWh in January 2015.
Load peaked on January 19 at 23,317 MW, compared with an all-time winter peak load of 25,738 MW on January 7, 2014.
At Transco Zone 6 New York, natural gas averaged $3.77/MMBtu in January, up from $1.60/MMBtu in December. At that location, spot gas averaged $7.237/MMBtu in January 2015, according to the Platts database.
From Brad Jones, NYISO’s newly appointed president and CEO, stakeholders also learned about NYISO’s FitzPatrick Nuclear Generating Facility deactivation study.
Entergy on November 13 notified NYISO of the proposed retirement of the 838-MW nuclear plant at the end of its current fuel cycle, which is expected to occur in the fourth quarter of 2016 or the first quarter of 2017.
“The FitzPatrick facility is a merchant generating facility that must rely on the revenues that it is able to earn either directly from the NYISO’s energy, capacity and ancillary service markets or through bilateral contracts,” said Marc L. Potkin, Entergy Wholesale Commodities vice president of power marketing, in a November 2 letter to the New York State Public Service Commission.
“Low commodity prices, combined with the plant’s distance from key load centers and market structure design flaws, including the failure of markets to compensate FitzPatrick for the generation of clean energy, have rendered the facility uneconomic now and for the foreseeable future,” Potkin said.
