The average cost for electricity in NYISO was $201.89/MWh in January, up nearly 53% from January 2025 and possibly the highest ever for the month, the ISO reported in its first market operations report of the year.

“I went back and manually clicked through all the previous January and February monthly market operations reports I could find,” said Shaun Johnson, vice president of market structures for NYISO. “This was the highest.”

Johnson cautioned he could not definitively say whether the prices were the highest for January ever. He said the documents he was able to pull were not comprehensive, and several years were missing market operations reports.

“$137 was the previous high number I was able to find,” he said, pointing to a report from February 2022.

Stakeholders asked whether this meant January’s average was the highest ever when adjusted for inflation. Johnson said he was not prepared to assert that. He said the figures from 2013, during the polar vortex cold snap, were also quite high.

The culprit was the late January winter storm. A graph in the operations report depicting the average daily cost shows a dip below $60/MWh before spiking as high as $840/MWh when the storm hit. The average cost for January 2025 was $132.26/MWh.

Johnson said the storm’s unusually large footprint, and the long duration of extremely low temperatures, contributed to the spike. The storm hit almost the entire East Coast, and demand on all of the Eastern Interconnection was high for an extended period.

The average locational-based marginal price was $192/MWh, up from $107.81/MWh in December 2025 and $127.05/MWh in January 2025. Natural gas prices at NY Transco Zone 6 were $19/MMBtu, up from $6.93/MMBtu in December 2025, showing the strong correlation between gas prices and electricity prices NYISO reported in the aftermath of the storm. (See NYISO: Gas Demand Soared Across Eastern U.S. During Fern.) However, it was a 2.2% decrease from January 2025.

A stakeholder representing Central Hudson Gas and Electric asked whether NYISO would consider also tracking the natural gas prices at Iroquois Zone 2, given that they also went “through the roof” during January. Johnson said he would look into it, but NYISO does not have a source that it can publish numbers from publicly.

Uplift costs were higher in January 2026 compared to the previous month: $1.79/MWh, from $1.11/MWh. Johnson said that he anticipated the Market Monitoring Unit would go into depth on this in its quarterly State of the Market report.