In the immortal words of Alanis Morrisette, the market is appearing to take more and more lead from gas price fluctuations. The correlations in the German and UK markets are very strong, and yet, with the spark spread languishing well below the coal spread the influence of gas is supposedly less. Powerisk says supposedly because in the marginal plant running order it is accepted that coal would burn first, but the gas plant will be the marginal plant. During the summer, many of the coalers will have to take outages and the gas plant will pick up the slack. In the past storage and flexibility within the market has been able to cope with this, at the moment this has been diminished with Rough problems, and the increase in outages in UK plant.

It appears that buying forward for March looks to be sensible, and perhaps, buying forward for April also has its merits, there is still time though to see a significant melt in snow and cold weather and for much of the plant that is out to return with a vengeance. With coal clean dark spreads at £70 for the day ahead there are some significant incentives to get the spanner monkeys working overtime.