Electricity Market Prices in Estonia and Finland Differ for Only 21 Hours in February

Prices in the Estonian price area of the Nord Pool Spot (NPS) electricity exchange fell by 1.2 per cent in February, reaching 33.42 euros per megawatt-hour, with NPS Estonian and Finnish prices differing for only 21 hours on the day-ahead market. On average, the Estonian price was higher by 0.25 euros per megawatt-hour than the Finnish price.

Market prices in the Latvian and Lithuanian price areas fell by one per cent on average in February, reaching 39.43 and 39.44 euros per megawatt-hour respectively, which is still approximately six euros higher than in the Estonian price area.

The NPS system price fell by three per cent last month to an average price of 29.05 euros per megawatt-hour. Compared to January, prices fell in most of the NPS price areas. While the highest hourly prices in the NPS system have typically been found in the Latvian and Lithuanian price areas, in February the highest hourly prices occurred in the price areas of southern Sweden, Finland and Denmark instead. The high hourly price was caused by post-emergency limits in southern Sweden, dealing with an emergency at the Olkiluoto 2 nuclear power plant in Finland, and a planned outage in the Polish-Swedish connection, amongst others.

Similarly to January, there was also a situation last month when the transmission capacity from Finland to Estonia was used fully and demand from the Baltic countries exceeded the full capacity of EstLinks.

Carbon dioxide emission quota prices, which also influence the electricity production price, continued their slow rise, remaining in the region of between 6.91 and 7.70 euros per tonne.

According to the financial transactions on the Nasdaq OMX Commodities market, the average price of electricity in the NPS Estonian price area for March 2015 could be 31.10 euros per megawatt-hour, and the average price of the second quarter could be 32.86 euros per megawatt-hour.

Market participants who bought risk-hedging instruments known as limited PTRs sold by Estonian and Latvian system operators earned over 215,000 euros in profit in February.