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? 😕
Relevant article from the Guardian basically 'because power plant operators could'
The network operator requested generators to produce more (due to the cold). Generators said "ka-ching!"