LONDON: Prompt natural gas prices in Britain rose on Wednesday morning as solid demand from utilities outstripped supply.
Prices for within-day delivery were trading at 55.00 pence per therm at 0916 GMT, up 1.55 pence since their last settlement. Prices for delivery on Thursday were up 0.40 pence at 55.00 pence per therm.
With supply flows at about 246 million cubic metres (mcm) on Wednesday and demand expected to be about 255 mcm, the system was 9 mcm undersupplied, National Grid data showed.
Demand from British gas-fired power stations is high because of outages at several nuclear plants and forecasts of low output from the country's wind power generators.
Seven reactors with a generating capacity of around 4.1 gigawatts (GW) are offline due to unplanned outages and statutory maintenance.
Wind power output in Britain was expected to fall to 1.5 GW on Thursday, down from around 2 GW on Wednesday, National Grid data showed. Britain has a total of around 8 GW of wind power capacity.
Further along the curve, gas for December delivery was 0.05 pence lower at 55.30 pence per therm.
In Britain's power market the nuclear outages helped to push up prices. Power for day-ahead baseload delivery traded at 50.05 pounds per megawatt hour, up 1.80 pounds.
In the Dutch TTF gas market, day-ahead prices were down 0.08 euros at 22.77 euros per megawatt hour. In Europe's carbon market, benchmark EU Allowances (EUA) edged down 0.03 euros to 6.99 euros a tonne.
The contract was likely to suffer from a downwards correction on Tuesday after climbing over 7 euros on Monday, analysts at Thomson Reuters Point Carbon said in a morning update.
The December 2014 contract hit an eight-month high of 7.07 euros in the previous session on utility buying and as traders pinned their hopes on an early start to reforms of the bloc's carbon market.
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