Wholesale electricity price normally fluctuates up and down quite a lot, but usually in the £0-£200-ish range. Yesterday afternoon it spiked up to £1400 briefly, then came back to normal. Unlucky to those paying dynamic pricing!
I can’t find any news or reporting about this. Any idea what happened?
I did notice that gas usage was really high, at about 26GW at one point, and wind was very low. So maybe it was simply high demand combined with low supply, now that we don’t have coal power? 😕
I don’t live in the UK, but I do know that if a nuclear reactor scrams(basically, enters a condition in which it needs to rapidly shut down to ensure plant safety, while rare it is entirely safe 99.9% of the time), it will often do this to power prices as other plants take time to start up and make up for the sudden loss in a large generator. It could have been that?
nope, I didn’t see any change in our nuclear output. And all the reactors are online, except one which is in planned maintenance: https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses