The Spring outage season, the time when nuclear facilities around the country shut down for refueling and general maintenance, is just around the corner. Plant managers schedule outages during the Spring and Fall when electricity use is generally lower because of milder temperatures. Industrial Info Resources, the leading provider of industrial market information, forecast a peak outage of 24GW of capacity off line in early April, which is lower than outages experienced in Fall 2009 (28 GW) and Spring 2010 ((25 GW). This forecast does not include unplanned outages or overruns which could easily raise the outages back to what we saw in fall of 2009.
During these shutdowns maintenance teams converge on a plant from all parts to minimize the time the facility is off line. They will replace spent fuel, conduct regular repairs and may undertake more complex projects like major turbine replacements or up-rate projects that increase the amount of electricity the plant can produce. The goal is to safely perform all repairs and maintenance as quickly as possible to get the unit back up to produce electricity.
The Spring outage season generally runs from early April to late May; if outages run long into June, the impact tends to be bullish for power prices. Electricity markets pay a lot of attention to outage season because a large amount of base-load power disappears from the market. During these outages, demand for electricity relies more heavily on gas-powered generators than usual, which makes understanding gas markets even more critical. If weather-based demand increase during outage season, or if outage season runs longer than expected, gas-fired generators will be called upon to meet the need and the impact for power prices will be bullish.