Power struggle

In April 1998, in the run-up to the restructuring of the Electricity Pool for England and Wales, Eileen Marshall of regulator Ofgem¹ told Energy Risk that a new UK wholesale power market structure would create "a much greater role for the financial trading of power to manage price volatility using futures, swaps and options". More than 10 years later, this brave new world has yet to emerge.

The UK was the first country to pursue a competitive, market-driven structure for electricity wholesale, an