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| Tuesday Jul 7, 2026 | |
| In our latest article, "A Bigger Fleet Meets a Windy June", we take a look at what happened to SPP wind generation in June 2026, and it turned out to be a record-setting month. The region averaged roughly 14.3 GW of wind, the strongest June on record, and on two separate days, June 9 and June 27, hourly output climbed into territory that ranks among the highest wind hours SPP has ever recorded in any season, not just summer. For a month when wind typically starts easing off after the spring peak, that's a notable break from the norm, and it's the kind of result that immediately raises the question of whether it was a fluke of weather or something more permanent. That's exactly the question the article sets out to answer. Installed wind capacity across SPP has grown from under 5 GW in 2011 ... » read more | |
| Monday Jul 6, 2026 | |
| ERCOT’s battery fleet has crossed a threshold this summer. Through the first five days of July, the fleet is pushing enough energy into the evening ramp to visibly shave the top off real-time prices, and that behavior is showing up directly in the arbitrage math. The TB4 and TB2 spreads, the value a 4-hour and a 2-hour battery are respectively built to capture, are running roughly a third to a half below where they sat a year ago at every hub. The fleet is, in effect, competing away the very spread it was built to harvest. Charging Midday, Capping the Ramp The daily storage picture over the past week lays out the rhythm. Each morning the fleet charges hard through the midday solar block, with aggregate charge pulling down toward the 9,000 to 10,000 MW range as solar floods the grid ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jul 2, 2026 | |
| Everything is bigger in Texas, and the ERCOT power stack keeps proving the saying. Load has been climbing for years — structural growth tied to data centers and electrification now dominates every forward conversation — and the supply side has been racing to keep up. Solar led the last wave, swelling into a midday force big enough to bend the price curve and carve a hole in the daytime thermal call. Now it is batteries making their move, scaling fast enough to swing thousands of megawatts between a midday charge trough and an evening discharge peak. A fleet that barely registered two years ago has become a daily player in its own right. Figure 1 | ERCOT Three-Year 12x24 Profiles – Power Storage, Coal, and Natural Gas That growth is doing more than reshaping battery ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jul 1, 2026 | |
| Summer arrived in earnest across the Midwest this week, with a heat wave pushing high temperatures into the 90s in cities throughout the region. Figure 1 lays out the 15-day temperature outlook, running from forecasts from the middle of the month on the far left through to yesterday's forecast on the far right. Blue shading marks days running cooler than normal, while orange highlights above-normal heat. The rightward march from blue into deep orange tells the story plainly. The cool middle of June has given way to a sustained and intensifying warm-up. Average temperatures across the Midwest have been holding above 80 degrees, well above what's normal for this point in the season. And the heat isn’t expected only in the Midwest; it’s widespread, which raises the prospect of ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jun 30, 2026 | |
| When western heat builds, the Southwest Power Pool's SWPW zone doesn't get to sit on the sidelines. On June 23, 2026, SWPW delivered the sharpest real-time evening ramp of the month—not because load was high, but because a warming Pacific Northwest and Northern California leaned hard on the broader grid exactly as solar output fell off the stack. The result was a dramatic divergence between what the day-ahead market had priced and what real-time actually had to pay. Through the midday solar window, real-time prices in the SWPW Hub were soft, averaging just $17.63/MWh across hours 9 through 18, even printing negative at HE9 (-$18.02) and HE10 (-$1.60) as midday supply comfortably outpaced demand. The picture shifted sharply into the evening ramp. Real-time ramp prices averaged ... » read more | |
| Monday Jun 29, 2026 | |
| Three currents are converging on the U.S. LNG complex this June, and together they reframe the Lower-48 demand conversation. The existing fleet has rarely looked healthier. The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is quietly re-balancing the global system. And the next wave of Gulf Coast capacity is now visibly at the gate — ready to become a dominant driver of domestic gas demand in the months ahead. The June Pull: A Fleet Running Near Record The export side of the fleet spent June running flat-out. Month-to-date, the nine liquefaction terminals drew an average 16,810 MMcf/d of feedgas — up roughly 2% on May and a striking 22% above the June-2025 average of 13,791. In a market where negative values denote gas pulled off the grid for liquefaction, the fleet is consuming more than ... » read more | |
| Friday Jun 26, 2026 | |
| The recently energized 1.25 GWa Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE) line from Canada to NYC was built out of view; buried underground or trenched into the sediments of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River running over 300 miles before popping out of the water in Astoria, Queens. As invisible as it physically is to the eye, so too are any power flows this month that might be moving from Canada to NYC. Accompanied by much fanfare, it operated for two days at 75% of its capacity at the beginning of June. With less fanfare, it has largely been inactive ever since. In contrast, the Northeast Clean Energy Connector (NECEC), completed at a similar time and at a similar capacity, has delivered steady supply to New England this month. In numerous articles and Northeast Market Flashes ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jun 25, 2026 | |
| A week ago we wrote up the first leg of the seasonal spill transition as the four Lower Columbia projects flipped from spring to summer fish spill operations on the 16th. This past Sunday, the 21st, the second leg arrived: the four Lower Snake dams — Ice Harbor, Little Goose, Lower Monumental, and Lower Granite — made the same switch, putting the entire lower system fully into summer spill. As our latest PNW Hydro Discussion framed it, the system is now "full into summer," with Grand Coulee's June refill nearly complete and a round of heat set to give way to cooler temperatures by the weekend. The Lower Snake switch played out differently than the Lower Columbia's, though. Figure 1 plots hourly generation and spill (kcfs) at the four LS projects over the past two weeks, with ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jun 24, 2026 | |
| Early June delivered a one-two punch to the Midwest grid. A sustained heat wave drove temperatures above seasonal norms and pushed MISO demand toward levels not seen since winter. Then a line of severe storms tore through the region just as the system was under its greatest strain. The collision of sudden loss of power in some areas and a flood of wind generation in others set off dramatic price swings in the real-time energy market that pushed key hubs to extremes. Figure 1 | Average Midwest Temperatures and Differences from Normal (May – June 2026) Figure 1 shows daily average Midwest temperatures from the start of May through June 18th. The top panel plots the daily average in degrees Fahrenheit, with orange bars marking days that ran above normal and blue bars marking those ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jun 23, 2026 | |
| If there has been one defining theme across the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) this June, it is the remarkable strength of wind generation. While electricity demand has followed a typical early-summer pattern, wind output has consistently exceeded expectations, becoming the dominant factor shaping market conditions across the region. Time and again, strong renewable production has helped offset rising demand, reducing pressure on the power system and keeping net load well below levels that might otherwise be expected during this time of year. Figure 1 | SPP 12x24 Profile What makes this period particularly noteworthy is not a single wind event, but rather the persistence of elevated wind production throughout the month. Wind generation has frequently operated near the upper end of the ... » read more | |