A fire on a gas platform in Centrica's gas storage field Rough, caused spikes in gas and power prompt prices. The market responded quite aggressively in the start but as news reached the market that the fire was relatively small, and that this would not be a long term problem, bears returned to the market. The technical phrase for this type of market information is a flash in a pan! No pun intended.

More importantly the EU Competition Commissioner promised that in the next three weeks there would be a string of anti-trust investigations into gas and power players across Europe. She did not go into specific details as to which companies would be under scrutiny but the Financial Times has guessed that EDF, GDF, E.ON and RWE will all be investigated. The five key areas that they have been looking at are

• Market Concentration
• Vertical Foreclosure
• Market Integration
• Price Formation
• Transparency

Perhaps the biggest potential change would be unbundling of vertical players, with supply and retail being separated from the generation. This has long been argued as a way of increasing transparency and competition within the market. The long -term outcome if this were to go ahead is that players would sign up long term contracts so that risk was managed and not at the whim of a wholesale market. That is not to say that all positions would be covered but the idea of a perfect competition being introduced is less.