While there has been some reasonable coverage of energy inflation of oil & gasoline in the last three years, the significant inflation of power prices has been under reported. This afternoon as you can read below, the auction for next year’s “capacity prices” for power in the PJM region (mostly the mid Atlantic and some midwest states) just jumped in the auction by 933% above this year’s. That is amazingly stunning inflation. As a customer, your power bill has three components: generation (the wholesale power generated at the power plants), transmission (the big lines running from power plants to towns), and distribution(the local lines in your town). While the latter two move up slowly as lines are built, the “generation” component is very dependent on wholesale power markets, and how many plants and what type plants are shutdown & built vs power demand. And capacity prices are a material component of generation prices. “Capacity contracts” are similar to having utility customers buying the ability to call on those power plants, and those prices will jump 933% next year for those of you in Pennsylvania, NJ, Ohio, MD, etc. I estimate for those of you there that your delievered prices might jump 25-50% next year as a result of this component of your bill jumping 933% Why has that occurred? We are shutting down more power plants than we are building in most regions of the US. Aka we are “de-electrifying”. And the ones we are shutting down usually run ~90% of the time, and the ones we are building run about 35% of the time. So its a double hit. And so we get 933% increase in capacity prices. Its important for people to understand this very material energy inflation is accelerating. And for those looking at electrification of the economy, this is a challenge. https://lnkd.in/erRKT_p3
Mind blowing pricing signal. Excellent and informative comments for everyone.
This has pretty incredible downstream effects. Thinking about the massive surge of power needs for AI.
Excellent important analysis
Super helpful and vital to highlight, Paul Dabbar!
Very well written and understandable for the general public.
Spot on !
President & CEO at Electric Power Supply Association
4moPaul Dabbar - interesting analysis - thanks for putting it out there. A few additional items for thought. The breakdown of charges is also further segmented, in that energy, capacity, and ancillary services make the generation charge. And the capacity charge is averaged over the three year forward it’s intended to use to mitigate spikes in prices. The three year average including the current auction is in the range of typical capacity charges as the two prior auctions were at or near record lows of $34 and $28 charges. So it may appear high, but is actually very close to historical averages. In the end, we agree that prices will likely increase when these costs are included, but the auction outcome looks to be a fairly straightforward supply and demand calculation. When we add increased demand to the formula, it pushes the intersection of the supply and demand the curves farther to the right. In the end, market signals are needed to incent new entry and efficient retirements and this is certainly a signal for market participants to respond to.