California power prices up 59% after San Onofre Nuclear shutdown

The nuclear shutdown at San Onofre is partially to blame for a 59 percent increase in wholesale electricity prices for California in the first half of the year, the Energy Information Administration said Tuesday.

The statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy found that wholesale electricity prices rose across the country during the first six months of 2013 over the same period last year.

Prices in New England were the highest largely because of pipeline constraints that limited the delivery of natural gas.

In California, the "increase was largely the result of the continued outage of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station," according to the agency's Today in Energy briefing. "This factor also caused a large and unusual separation in power prices between the northern and southern parts of the state's electric system."

M. Tyson Brown, a statistician at the Energy Information Administration, clarified that a modest rebound in historically low natural gas prices has been the main driver of the overall increase in wholesale electricity in California. Natural gas generation is California's principal source of electricity.

Since the San Onofre outage began in January 2012, however, there has been a persistent spread between wholesale power prices in Northern and Southern California, Brown explained.

"The Southern California prices have been a good deal higher than the Northern California prices," he noted.

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