SPP’s Marketing Monitoring Unit on Thursday released its annual State of the Market report for 2020. The Monitor has scheduled a webinar for Aug. 25 at noon CT to discuss both it and the Spring 2021 quarterly market report, released late last month.
The MMU shared a draft of the annual report last month with SPP’s Board of Directors and Members Committee. (See “MMU Briefs Draft Market Report,” SPP Board of Directors/Members Committee Briefs: July 26-27.)
The annual report’s key conclusions include:
- Wind generation accounted for the largest percentage of total energy produced, at 31.3%, just ahead of coal at 31%. SPP’s nameplate wind capacity increased to just over 27.3 GW in 2020, up about 22% from 2019.
- Day-ahead market prices averaged $17.69/MWh and real-time prices averaged $16.62/MWh, a 20% drop for both from 2019 and the lowest since the Integrated Marketplace went live in 2014. The average gas price at the Panhandle Eastern hub was $1.72/MMBtu, down 11% from $1.93 the year before.
- Total electric consumption was down about 3% in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The annual peak load of 49,569 MW was also 3% lower than in 2019.
The Monitor made three new recommendations, all unrelated to the February winter storm: updating market and outage requirements to improve transmission congestion rights’ funding; improving market-to-market efficiencies by working with MISO; and raising the offer floor to ‑$100/MW.
