What is a Triad?
Triads are the top three half-hourly peaks of national energy demand across the grid, separated by ten clear calendar days, over the most energy-intensive period of the year: November to February. National Grid confirms these peaks after this period, at the end of March.
Typically, Triads occur when high business demand meets increased domestic demand, causing an overall spike in energy use and increasing the costs of using the energy system.
To mitigate against Triad costs, companies and suppliers work hard to predict when they will occur, so that they can turn down or off their energy usage during those periods. Due to the increasing use of Triad avoidance schemes as well as flexibility solutions, such as Demand Side Response and the growing use of renewables, they are getting harder to predict.
The impact of Triads on your electricity invoice:
To manage the huge demand on the network during the Triad periods, the National Grid imposes a Transmissions Network Use of System (TNUoS) charge. This is used to finance the maintenance of the UK’s electricity grid to ensure future supply. Impacting customers with half-hourly meters, the charge is proportional to a business’ energy use over the Triad periods (the three half-hours of highest demand) and is linked to their location. If a business doesn’t consume electricity in the three Triad periods, they don’t pay HH (half-hourly) TNUoS charges for the entire financial year. Triads will remain until April 2023.
The Brook Green Supply Service:
We will provide our customers on either a non-commodity pass-through or fully flexible procurement contracts with a simple and concise email each morning prior to 10AM to alert them if there is a Low/Medium or High risk of a Triad occurring and within a specific time-band on that day.
Last week saw bullish moves in power and gas despite overall bearish fundamentals in weather and LNG supply. The key supporting factor for this move in power were the bullish moves in carbon contracts.
The beginning of last week saw Freeport LNG terminal seek permission to start injecting natural gas into its cooling pipes, signalling the imminent return to operational capacity, this saw front month gas markets shed value aggressively.
Last week saw the market begin to be laced with short term bullish sentiment as low wind generation and cold temperatures helped to support gas demand across Europe.
Last week saw the market dominated by bearish sentiment as wind generation and wild temperatures helped to reduce gas demand across Europe. Weather forecasts continue to the driving force for movements in markets.
Last week saw a major sell off particularly in front month contracts but also along the curve as a result of bearish weather fundamentals and plentiful supplies of LNG arriving on UK shores.
Last week saw the market begin very bullishly as a result of significant emerging weather fundamentals, namely: cold temperatures and low wind generation (20% below seasonal norms). This resulted in some highly volatile price action along the curve.
Early last week saw markets come off hard, while still littered with volatility as prices were jumping around and very large trading ranges emerged across most contracts. However, the markets well and truly closed in a bullish manner.
Early last week saw a lot of market volatility with prices jumping and very large trading ranges across most contracts, this was primarily due to market uncertainty and fundamentals such as an ‘incident’ at a Norwegian gas terminal.
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Welcome to October, the beginning of winter delivery and the start of a new gas year for the entirety of Europe. The ever-changing energy markets saw another week of volatility last week, as four leaks were found on the two Nord stream pipelines.
The ever-changing energy industry saw another week of volatility as governments across Europe looked to protect their consumers and economies from large scale increases in prices going to winter.