On 23rd July, the Analytics Team hosted a webinar to present the new Price Cap Inputs Dashboard, which will now be used by Ofgem to update figures for both the CfD and CM schemes when setting the price cap. The new inputs were to be taken from the In-Period tracking dashboard for Q4 unless a BPA was undertaken, in which case the BPA inputs would be used instead.
After receiving supplier feedback, we have decided to simplify this process by always using the In-Period tracking data for all quarters currently tracked, which are the current and next quarter. This means there will always be a single market date for those quarters, which won't change regardless of whether there is a BPA or not. So, for the next price cap update, this will be the tracking data for Q3 (Jul-Sept) and Q4 (Oct-Dec). However, for Q1 2026, which also feeds into the next price cap, we will still either use the 2-year forecast from the last determination or from a 2-year forecast published on August 18th if a BPA is needed.
To further improve this process in the future, we are working on expanding our tracking dashboard to include additional quarters, meaning that in the future all Price Cap inputs will either come from actual data or from the Tracking Dashboard.
We will update our key dates dashboard to show the market date of the relevant tracking under the column name "Price Cap Inputs - Market Date", giving supplier certainty on which date will feed into price cap. This will always be the last tracking published before the price cap observation window ends. For the coming quarter, the price cap observation window ends on August 18th, the last tracking before that will be published on August 12th and will use a market date of August 8th. The price cap inputs dashboard will then be updated on the 18th and remain published until the end of the next obligation window in November, when it will be updated for the next price cap period.
Due to these changes, we have decided not to go forward with the BPA announcement ahead of time, as we are instead providing suppliers with market date certainty by committing to using the Tracking Dashboard for all quarters tracked. In the future, we will be extending the tracking dashboard to include all quarters relevant to the price cap. This gives us more flexibility and time to observe the market and only enact a BPA if required. However, we will continue to try to publish any BPA's on the BPA publication date.