UK Energy Market Report - 14 August 2026

An unplanned outage at Norway’s Kollsnes plant pushed NBP day-ahead up 1.10p to 149.60 p/therm on Thursday, while the near forward curve gave back around a quarter of Wednesday’s surge and power did the reverse.

The prompt and the forward curve parted company on Thursday, and they did it in both fuels at once.

NBP Day-Ahead settled 1.10p higher at 149.60 p/therm, the highest print of this run, after an unplanned outage at Norway’s Kollsnes processing plant. Every gas contract from September to Q1-27 fell about 1% on the same session.

Power did the mirror image. Day-ahead baseload settled 3.65 lower at 145.50 £/MWh while the forwards barely moved, and the balancing market ran to 349.00 £/MWh.

Gas Market

NBP Day-Ahead settled at 149.60p on 13 August, up 1.10p or 0.7%, and just short of the 150p handle.

The cause was physical. Gassco cut capacity at Kollsnes to 145.2 mcm/day from 156.0 on an unplanned outage, taking almost 11 mcm/day of Norwegian supply out of Northwest Europe at short notice.

The forward curve went the other way. Sep-26 fell 1.43p to 148.48p, Oct-26 1.53p to 149.28p and Nov-26 1.61p to 152.38p. Q4-26 lost 1.51p to 151.94p, Q1-27 1.08p to 146.30p and Winter-26 1.29p to 149.15p.

Read that against Wednesday and it is a pause, not a reversal. Q4-26 added 5.77p on Wednesday and gave back 1.51p on Thursday, so 4.26p of the move is still in the price. Sep-26 has kept 4.26p of 5.69p and Winter-26 4.20p of 5.49p, which is roughly three quarters of the repricing surviving the first session that tested it.

The far curve was flat to marginally firmer. Summer-27 gained 0.65p to 95.42p and Winter-27 0.11p to 93.79p, while Summer-28 slipped 0.13p to 69.25p and Winter-28 added 0.14p to 76.52p.

The shape tells you what came off. Winter-26 now stands 53.73p a therm above Summer-27, against 55.67p on Wednesday and 53.71p on Tuesday. The market handed back the winter premium it built on Wednesday, not the price level. Buyers watching how far the winter contracts have run ahead of the summer ones are looking at the right number.

Britain stayed the cheapest hub in Europe, and got cheaper in relative terms. NBP settled 149.60p against TTF 151.61p, PVB 152.08p, PEG 153.01p, THE 153.29p, PSV 154.64p and Austrian VTP 154.89p. The discount to TTF narrowed to 2.01p from 2.64p on Wednesday, although TotalEnergies reports it widening again by around 0.6p this morning.

The physical picture this morning is comfortable. At the 07:00 stamp Norwegian flows had recovered, with Langeled up 4.90 to 47.60 mcm/day and Vesterled and Flags up 4.00 to 14.00. UKCS production rose 3.50 to 86.70, system demand fell 11.34 to 136.65 and linepack built 12.74 to 337.89 mcm. TotalEnergies expects the day to finish stronger still, with Norwegian exports nominated at 63 mcm/day.

LNG remains the weak leg. Sendout was 5.30 mcm/day at 07:00, all of it South Hook and a trickle from the Isle of Grain, against 40.09 mcm/day flowing out through IUK and BBL.

At the 09:20 stamp the whole curve is bid. Day-Ahead is indicated 150.97p, with Sep-26 at 151.70p, Q4-26 at 155.21p and Winter-26 at 152.23p, each around 3p above Thursday’s close.

The card below summarises where NBP contracts settled on Thursday against the previous session.

Electricity Market

UK day-ahead baseload settled at 145.50 £/MWh on 13 August, down 3.65 or 2.4%, ending a three-session climb.

Day-ahead peak fell further, settling 3.80 lower at 133.91 £/MWh. So the inversion this report has been tracking is still there, with baseload sitting 11.59 £/MWh above the peak block against 11.44 on Wednesday.

The forwards did not follow. Sep-26 baseload eased 0.20 to 122.48 £/MWh, Oct-26 0.59 to 120.03, Nov-26 0.81 to 130.43, Q4-26 0.59 to 126.51 and Winter-26 0.56 to 124.77. That is a 2.4% fall on the prompt against 0.4% on Winter-26.

Two contracts rose outright. Winter-27 added 0.46 to 85.42 and Winter-28 0.31 to 72.75, while Summer-27 slipped 0.13 to 82.78 and Summer-28 0.74 to 64.46. Winter-26 holds a 41.99 £/MWh premium over Summer-27, barely changed from 42.42.

The reason the forwards held is French. Heat related outages across the French nuclear fleet are still tightening regional supply, which thins the import cushion the interconnectors normally provide through a European winter.

The domestic schedule adds to it. Hartlepool 2 has been off since 7 August on a 16-day outage, Heysham 1 reactor 1 comes fully off on 17 August for 15 days, Torness 1 on 21 August for 17 days and Heysham 2 reactor 8 on 4 September for 80 days.

The balancing market is where the strain actually showed. The daily maximum System Buy Price reached 349.00 £/MWh at 21:18 on 13 August, the highest of the run and a fourth consecutive rise after 227.00 on 10 August, 202.61 on 11 August and 265.89 on 12 August. The day’s minimum System Sell Price was 70.40 at 16:18.

So the day-ahead eased while the evening peak got tighter, which is the opposite of what a softening market normally looks like.

Yesterday’s morning indications need owning, because they were the worst this report has published. It carried 110.00 £/MWh as the 09:18 indication for Thursday’s baseload day-ahead and it settled 145.50, out by 35.50. Peak was indicated 146.67 and settled 133.91, out by 12.76 the other way, and gas Day-Ahead was indicated 145.99p against a 149.60p settlement.

The pattern matters more than any single miss. Every one of those indications pointed sharply down and every one settled well above, the gas forwards included, which came in around 2.6p light across Sep-26, Q4-26 and Winter-26. The morning index leans on the previous close and under-reads a market that is still rising, and this morning it has flipped to point sharply up, with Sep-26 baseload 3.52 higher at 126.00 and Winter-26 3.13 higher at 127.90. Direction, not dealable prices.

The weather is genuinely easing. Temperatures peak around 22°C today before settling to 19 or 20°C over the weekend and converging on the 16 to 17°C seasonal mean by 21 August.

Wind is the near-term risk rather than the heat. Forecast wind and solar output drops to roughly 5,000 MWh around 16 August, well under the 9,500 MWh seasonal norm, before recovering above it to around 11,000 MWh on 18 and 19 August.

Oil, Carbon and Global Commodities

Brent M+1 settled at 87.07 $/barrel on Thursday, down 1.91 or 2.2%, on softer demand prospects and a substantial build in United States oil stockpiles.

It has reversed part of that this morning. TotalEnergies attributes the bounce to United States threats of an indefinite naval blockade of Iran, which puts supply risk back into a market that had spent the session pricing surplus.

Coal API2 for Cal-27 eased 0.33 to $125.42/tonne.

Carbon rose while gas forwards fell. EUA Dec-26 added 0.75 to €82.74 and UK ETS Dec-26 gained 0.62 to £59.02, a rise of 1.1%.

At Thursday’s 1.1697 sterling rate the European allowance is worth about £70.74, putting the UK scheme roughly £11.72 a tonne below its European equivalent, against £11.59 on Wednesday. That discount has now widened for a third consecutive session.

The LNG complex was mixed. JKM front month fell 0.18 to $21.08/MMBtu while TTF spot held at $20.45 and NBP spot firmed 0.14 to $20.17, with Henry Hub 0.05 softer at $2.77.

JKM now carries a 0.63 $/MMBtu premium over TTF, down from 0.82 on Wednesday. Asia bidding less hard is the first thing that would loosen European sendout.

Sterling eased against both currencies, at 1.1697 to the euro and 1.3485 to the dollar.

Storage and Supply Outlook

EU inventories were roughly 60% full on 11 August, around 12 percentage points below the same point last year. That gap has not closed at any stage this injection season, and it is why the winter premium keeps rebuilding.

The spread across the continent remains wide. Italy sits at 77% and Spain at 72%, but France is at 59%, Germany 47%, Britain 41%, and the Netherlands and Belgium 39% each.

Germany still below half full in the middle of August is the number to carry into any winter pricing conversation.

British sites are drifting rather than filling. South Hook is 72% full, Holehouse Farm 70%, Stublach 68%, Holford 61%, Hill Top 44%, Hornsea 42%, Aldbrough 41%, Isle of Grain 37% and Dragon 33%. Rough and Humbly Grove remain at zero.

The arrivals schedule into North West Europe carries ten cargoes and 937 mcm to 19 August, six of them American and two Russian, into Dunkirk and Gate on the same day, 15 August.

None is booked into a British terminal, which is why sendout sits at 5.30 mcm/day while Britain exports 40.09.

What This Means for Your Business

Thursday’s 1.5p giveback on the gas curve is noise against what has happened since last Friday.

Q4-26 closed on 7 August at 139.23p and settled Thursday at 151.94p, a move of 12.71p a therm in four sessions. Sep-26 has added 12.53p over the same period and Winter-26 12.46p.

A quote issued last week for an autumn or winter start is not marginally stale, it is 12p a therm stale, and Thursday’s small correction does not change that.

The shape is the more useful signal. The curve gave back the extra winter premium it built on Wednesday but held the level, so Winter-26 still stands 53.73p above Summer-27. The market is repricing a season, not the commodity, which is the case for splitting a winter position across several buying decisions rather than committing on one screen price.

On power, the day-ahead is the wrong number to run a business on. It settled 145.50 on Thursday, is indicated at 145.00 today, and the balancing market touched 349.00 on the same evening it supposedly softened. A fixed-price contract absorbed none of that. Anything sitting on pass-through absorbed all of it.

The watch list into next week is short and specific. Kollsnes needs to come back, wind output troughs around 16 August, Heysham 1 comes fully off on 17 August and Torness 1 on 21 August, European storage is still 12 percentage points behind, and the Iran blockade threat is now in the oil price.

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Previous report: UK Energy Market Report – 13 August 2026