Alberta Power Snapshot - February 2025
Looking back on the Alberta Power Market in February, we probably start to sound like a broken record - another month with a record of zero-dollar hours!
[This article is not financial or investment advice, but provided for general information purposes only. All information is subject to change and should not be relied upon for any decision making. See Webpage Terms of Use.]
The Data
Weather-wise, February had pretty much everything - snow, ice, some extreme cold around the middle of the month, and very warm Chinook winds at the end. And many of the frosty days ended up being quite windy, which led to much lower prices than similarly cold periods in prior years:
Heat Map of February 2025 hourly Alberta power pool prices.
Vertical axis: hour of the day, from hour 0 on top to hour 24 at the bottom.
Horizontal axis: day of the month, from 1st to 28th.
Colors: Hourly pool price, with each block representing one hour
black - “zero-dollar” (CAD 0/MWh);
grey - “ultra cheap” (CAD 0.01-30/MWh),
light green - “cheap” (CAD 30-50/MWh),
dark blue - “normal” (CAD 50-70/MWh),
yellow - “expensive” (CAD 70-100/MWh),
orange - “very expensive” (CAD 100-300/MWh)
red - “extremely expensive” (CAD 300-500/MWh)
maroon - “peak prices” (CAD 500-1,000/MWh)
We can see very high “peak prices” on the third, fourth and eleventh day of the month, and otherwise a rather “subdued” price environment, with a significant number of zero-dollar and “ultra'-cheap” hours. But visuals can be deceiving, thus let’s examine the summary statistics:
February average electricity pool prices, 2005-2025 (CAD/MWh)
Prices are not inflation-adjusted.
The average hourly pool price in February was CAD 22.64/MWh, lower than during the last four years but overall rather “average”. It gets a bit more interesting when we examine the average cost of the daily lowest-cost 8 hours, representing potential value for flexible / dispatchable loads:
Daily lowest-cost 8 hours, average for February, 2005-2025 (CAD/MWh)
Prices are not inflation-adjusted.
At CAD 14.22/MWh, this value is very low, already indicating that the distribution of prices must have shifted toward the extreme low end. The extent to which this has happened becomes obvious once we look at zero-dollar hours:
Monthly zero-dollar hours for February, 2005-2025
That’s right - 64 zero-dollar hours in a month that had seen such low prices only once before, in 2015, and back then there was a total of 2 over the entire month.
As a reminder, zero dollars is the current floor price in the Alberta power pool, and in almost all instances there is excess power supply during these hours, leading to curtailments. If / when the price floor is lowered to a negative price value, expected with the Restructured Energy Market in 2026/7, most if not all of these hours would settle in negative territory. And due to the structural changes in the market, the trend toward temporary oversupply and thus zero/negative prices will accelerate further.
At Arder Energy, we expect around 1,000 zero-dollar hours for this year, up from 376 in 2024 (which was a record in itself, see our article “2024 in Review”). For more details on what is driving this trend, see our article “The Change is Structural, not Cyclical!”.
But most importantly, if you are a power consumer or generator looking for ways to convert this challenge into an opportunity, please get in touch!