I have been following the electricity generation and gas delivery over the last 9 months, longer in terms of electricity. The gas prices which pushed up electricity are now falling. Gas futures have been higher than 450p a Therm (30 kWh to a Therm roughly). Today gas futures are down to 220p and have been falling consistently for the last couple of weeks. Russian gas has proved to be dispensable , Germany, the main customer was buying 50% of its gas from Russia. They have cut consumption by 15% leaving a shortfall of ~35%. The UK has been receiving LNG from Qatar and the US in boat loads, with a one way traffic of LNG converted to gas piped to the continent plus 4-5 GW of electricity sent via interconnectors too. That has been a massive effort rarely publicised by the press. Other routes from Italy and Spain have added to the supply to the extent that European gas storage reached 100% full by the end of November. This was far above what was expected and hoped for. The recent cold spell has led to a withdrawal of gas stocks to 84%. But industry is closed for the most part across Europe for 2 weeks and as of Friday, it was mild and windy, tankers were offloading LNG and wind farms were producing sufficient electricity that gas was being returned to storage in the UK and the gas interconnectors running at half output, but that is still equal to about 25 GW of gas or 12 GW of electricity. (CCGT being about 50% efficient.)
Germany has opened its first of 5 floating LNG terminals, this will provide about 10% of its gas and tankers are on their way to offload now.
World LNG supplies were hampered in 2022 by accidents on 2 major LNG export terminals, one off Australia and the other Freeport in the States. Those 2 terminals are normally filling tankers at the rate of 3 a day. The Australian terminal came on line in the autumn, Freeport will restart at half cock any day now, though they are having difficulties satisfying the safety regulators.
Depending on how far ahead the energy firms have hedged, the government intervened to force hedging after Bulb collapsed, the effect of price falls may be felt before winter next year.
The UK‘s wind power has had a high output this autumn, in part helping gas stocks, but also making a packet for the Low Cost Carbon Company on the cfds it has awarded. Over this autumn SeaGreen wind farm has been built and it should be complete some time in February. Neart Na Goithe will follow in the autumn along with Viking wind farm on Shetland. Dogger Bank A another 1.2 GW wind farm has been started but awaits the arrival of a new heavy lift crane in April. With only about 80 turbines to install it is also scheduled to be ready by next winter. Altogether that is an additional 3 GW of generation that wasn’t there last October.
In the meantime French nuclear reactors are coming back on line with 40 GW of the fleet available. Another 5 GW due back by late spring. That is 50% more than last autumn.
So altogether there should be no shortage of electricity to share round Europe and gas stocks will be built up over the summer again. There isn’t a shortage of gas it just needs to be moved around. In 3 years time Qatar should have another massive lng plant to export its massive gas resources and the problem fixed.
So the high electricity prices should fall quite quickly and certainly by December 2023 we should be looking at prices around 15p a kWh or less.
