EDF’s 2020 nuclear outage schedule has seen French forward power prices surge since late April. Covid restrictions are causing EDF to delay maintenance outages into Winter 20-21 and reduce forecast 2020 output by 80 TWh vs 2019 (see right hand panel of chart). This has seen French power prices surge across Winter 20-21, diverging from what is usually a tight linkage to neighbouring markets (see left hand panel). Reduced French output points to a major tightening across Western Europe (e.g. reversing UK interconnector flows across the winter). The memories of Win 16-17 are still fresh.
French nuclear outages cause price surge