Preliminary electricity prices for the rest of 2022 and next year skyrocketed on Wednesday morning after Russia cut gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria.
–
This is stated by several experts VG has spoken to. This means that you may notice it already on the electricity bill for May.
– The market opened with the electricity price going up four to five øre for the rest of this year and 3.5 øre for next year. This is because European electricity prices will be higher because gas power costs will be higher as the market is unsure whether to actually receive gas deliveries from Russia in the future, says Andreas Myhre, director of power trading at Entelios, which is wholly owned by Agder Energi.
Speaking on Wednesday morning, he says that it looks like gas power from Russia to Poland is flowing again, even though the state-owned Russian oil company Gazprom earlier on Wednesday enlightened that they have stopped their supplies of gas to Poland and Bulgaria as a result of the two countries refusing to pay for the gas with Russian rubles.
Ministry of Energy of Bulgaria sier that the proposed payment solution Gazprom has presented, payment in rubles, is a breach of contract.
Last year, the EU received around 40 percent of its gas from Russia, and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday referring to Russia’s gas shutdown as “blackmail”, and calls the move “unjustified and unacceptable”.
–Russia will have paid in rubles to limit the impact of financial sanctions and strengthen the ruble.
– Putin is waving the cards
Myhre says that the market is always forward-looking and envisions different scenarios.
– Now it becomes more likely that there will be a “cut off” and therefore prices will rise. The electricity bill for May will be affected by this if it holds, he adds.
According to Myhre, German electricity prices with delivery next year have increased seven percent since Tuesday, while Norwegian electricity delivered next year went up five percent on Wednesday morning before falling back slightly.
– The part that is related to the power cost became five percent more expensive after this move. Putin is waving his cards, says Myhre.
He adds that prices will increase even more if Russia also stops gas to Germany.
Can increase from 0 to 50 øre
Tor Reier Lilleholt, head of analysis at Volue Insight, can also say that electricity prices for next year have begun to rise after Putin throttled the gas supply.
– It can mean anything from zero to fifty øre and the question is how long it lasts. The uncertainty that is coming now will raise the price of electricity over a longer period of time. It will start to be critical for next winter if nothing happens to the weather, says Lilleholt considering that it has not rained properly for many months in southern Norway and that there is little snow in the mountains to fill Norwegian reservoirs when the spring melting begins. .
But he believes that power prices in Norway will, after all, rise less than in the rest of Europe as a result of cuts in Russian gas and that much of the risk has already been priced in.
– In connection with the Ukraine crisis, prices in southern Norway have risen by one kroner. They were a penny before (war, ed.anm.) and the trend was declining, but in the last month and a half they have risen a penny solely as a consequence of the conflict and gas prices. Now the prices for next year have started to rise, says Lilleholt.
–
