London (Platts)--4Feb2013/818 am EST/1318 GMT

Prompt power prices surged higher Monday morning as nuclear maintenance outages shaved around 2 GW from total UK generation ahead of rising demand associated with colder than average conditions, market sources said.

On the OTC market day-head baseload was last heard over GBP1 higher than Friday's close at GBP48.10/MWh while peakload power surged GBP3.30 higher to GBP57.70/MWh.

The N2EX day-ahead baseload power auction outturned higher than OTC at GBP48.83/MWh for Tuesday delivery, up almost GBP3 from Friday's result for Monday.

Peak daily power demand is set to rise from 52.2 GW Monday evening to just under 53 GW forecast for the same time Tuesday as temperatures slip below the seasonal average.

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In addition, nuclear generation has fallen from around 8.3 GW late last week to just over 7.6 GW midday Monday following a flurry of planned and unplanned outages on EDF Energy's fleet of reactors in recent days.

"Nuclear generation is down under 8 GW this morning with the Hartlepool 2 reactor out for a statutory outage until the 24th of the month, Dungeness B22 out for refueling and Heysham 1-2 tripping offline over the weekend, which combined have taken nearly 2 GW of generation off the grid," a market source said.

However, wind generation has capped further gains, remaining at near-record levels and helping to limit reliance on costly gas-fired generation.

At midday wind generation was pegged at 4.6 GW (or 10.3% of the generation mix) while gas-burn was limited to 10.2 GW (or 22.7%) and coal remained dominant at 18.7 GW (or 41.4%).

In addition, continental power imports remain healthy at around 1.7 GW (or 3.9%).

Temperatures are set to cool over the coming week, falling from 2 degrees Celsius above the seasonal norm of 3-9 C to 2 C below and 3 C under the average by the weekend, according to forecaster CustomWeather.

Weekend baseload prices rose GBP1 from Friday's close for delivery last weekend to GBP48.25/MWh, while baseload for week 7 traded up from Friday's close of GBP49.65/MWh for week 6 to GBP51.10/MWh midday Monday.

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