The capacity market cleared at £6.95/kW, the EMR delivery body confirmed late Friday, equating to a guaranteed £377m for the UK’s power generators.
Although results remain provisional until 15 February, contracts totalling 54.4GW are set to be handed to generators to provide power next winter.
Almost 92% of those bidding for contracts were successful. The lions’ share, 40.5% or 22GW, was picked up by existing gas power stations, equating to £153m in guaranteed payments. Coal, or co-firing coal and biomass plants, landed 19% (10.5GW, £73m). EDF received a £55m windfall for 7.9GW of contracted nuclear generation.
Virtually all of the UK’s dispatchable generation operators were vying for contracts. But owners of plant totalling 4.85GW decided it was not economic to run, build or qualify new units at the offered payment. Some of the larger thermal capacity to exit the auction include SSE’s Peterhead power station and International Power’s Deeside CCGT, as well as two of the units at the Uniper-owned (Eon) Ratcliffe coal-fired station.
The clearing price was also too low for 567MW of unproven demand-side response, dealing a blow to aggregators including Enernoc, Kiwi Power and SmartestEnergy, although Enernoc secured around 60MW of generation contracts (worth around £420,000).
A handful of Flexitricity’s unproven DSR units also exited the auction, although the firm was the most successful by volume of all the aggregators in terms of proven DSR and generating units. It won contracts totalling approximately 210MW – around 100MW unproven DSR plus 11oMW of generation – worth almost £1.5m.
Aggregator Restore also secured contracts topping 100MW for existing generating units.
See the full results and breakdown here.
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