Menu
Featured Articles
| Wednesday Jun 12, 2024 | |
| This May came with some intense weather for the state of Texas. Wind and rain caused widespread destruction, as well as multiple power outages. From the power perspective, we covered the events impacting ERCOT in our morning reports and market flashes. More recently, we wrote about how the ERCOT battery fleet fared this May and how just a few days of high prices impacted the monthly averages. Read on for a sneak peek at our most recent battery report, ‘A May Day for ERCOT Batteries’. With one glance at our ERCOT Monthly Battery Dashboard, you’ll notice a lot to celebrate for ERCOT batteries this May. The figure below displays the average buy and sell prices using our TB2 method which assumes batteries are selling in the top 2 priced hours in the day-ahead market and ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jun 11, 2024 | |
| The California market was riding a little bit of a high note last week with Sacramento tapping triple digits while Southern California saw three straight days of low wind generation as daytime highs in the low/mid 80’s inland. It helped that the Southwest was feeling the heat as both Arizona and Nevada both displayed record temperatures for this time of year. The high note comes in the form of having enough demand to keep the renewable energy space from needing to curtail megawatts to balance the system. Figure 1 | CAISO Potential Renewable Solar and Wind Generation The price action in the day-ahead market took the SP15 negative midday value and pushed it up into the low teens where the heavy load average jumped up as high as $22.02 on the 6th while the bookend dates ... » read more | |
| Monday Jun 10, 2024 | |
| An important but easily overlooked element of Pacific Northwest power and gas markets is constraints on pipeline transport capacity. As the better part of the Pacific Northwest natural gas supply comes from production in British Columbia, an innocuous bit of maintenance can quickly shift the fundamentals. June 3rd through 10th has seen one such event, with a meaningful capacity constraint at Station 4B south. While May rates sat between 1.5 and 1.7 BCF/day, the first part of June has been limited to 1.13. In other words, approximately half a BCF has gone missing. Figure 1: Sumas NG receipts (MCF/day) Figure 1 shows gas receipts at Sumas, where the same pipe crosses the US/Canada border. While no capacity constraint exists at this point, the entire region sits downstream of ... » read more | |
| Friday Jun 7, 2024 | |
| The electricity market chess board has never been this complicated: energy transition, “surging demand”, the need for new transmission, resource adequacy, low hydro, evolving market design. It’s hard to track let alone process all that is unfolding. I had a week of PTO at the end of May. It does a body good to get off the grid, sit in a raft, stare at beautiful scenery, sleep in a tent, drink beer out of a can, and unwind. Since my return, I’ve had a number of interesting things come across my radar. Thinking through how to connect these dots is a challenge. I’ll give it a try. Anytime you can listen to an interview with Jigar Shah who runs DOE’s Loan Program Office (LPO) you should do so. I recently heard him on the “Energy Gang” podcast ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jun 6, 2024 | |
| For many energy markets across the United States where renewables have been adopted as an important portion of the supply stack, the seasonal trends are the opposite of wind’s renewable counterpart of solar energy. That is, whereas the summer approaches and brings more heat and intense solar rays, wind typically peaks during the month of April, then begins to decline over the rest of the spring to bottom out during the summer. Our latest Renewable Monthly Report, “May 2024 – Giving Way to the Sun” discusses how this trend is playing out (and where it is not, namely CAISO) and puts the spotlight onto solar across the country. California solar has been front and center all year, with massive oversupply problems in Southern California providing the ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jun 5, 2024 | |
| It’s the first week of June and the official start to summer is only a few short weeks away. For nuclear plants across the country, this means outage season is wrapping up as plants prepare to offer baseload energy during the high-demand summer months. The drop-off in nuclear outages over the last several weeks has been drastic, as shown in our Daily NRC Nuclear Plant Summary Dashboard. Earlier in the spring, many plants were offline for refueling and outages peaked over 20 GW in April. By the middle of May this number dropped under 13 GW. In the first few days of June, the total number of outages was under 2 GW and now sits around 3 GW. Only two plants are still ramping back online after refueling while over 25 plants completed their maintenance and are back online from refueling ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jun 4, 2024 | |
| The heat is on, and it pertains to the western energy grid as the Pacific Northwest looks to have its daytime highs reach into the mid/upper 80’s while parts of the Desert Southwest are looking at the 110-115 degree marker by Thursday. Figure 1 | AG2 Southwest Region Heat Map – Delta From Normal Now one might recall that it was in June 2021 when the Pacific Northwest was wrapped within the newly minted ‘term’ now known as a ‘heat dome’. This is when a high-pressure system pushes up from the south and wards off the low-pressure system off the Pacific near Alaska. The event was quite extreme given the region saw the daytime high reach 120 degrees if not a few degrees warmer when you consider all the elements. This was the first ... » read more | |
| Monday Jun 3, 2024 | |
| May has come and gone with plenty of action items that lay the foundation for what is to come in June and that of the summer months better known as Q3 (July, August and September). The recently released eCommerce Monthly Recap, titled ‘May’s Blossoming Flowers’ details how the natural gas landscaped played out after an April with limited upside when it came to the near-term price action, how the power sector is dealing with the influx renewables and how Mother Nature impacts the power demand numbers. Figure 1 | May’s Blossoming Flowers The content mentioned above is part of the Platinum/Platinum packages we offer via our eCommerce platform on the EnergyGPS website. Just like any other month that gets put in the books, there is a lot of muscle building that ... » read more | |
| Friday May 31, 2024 | |
| In 1932 construction was completed on the Owyhee Dam making it the tallest dam in the world at the time (417 feet) [1]. Located in eastern Oregon, it served as a prototype for the Hoover Dam which claimed the title in 1936. The Owyhee Dam is still in operation providing flood control, irrigation, and some energy. Upstream of the Dam is the Owyhee Reservoir, the largest Reservoir in Oregon stretching 52 miles! I had the pleasure, or misfortune, of rowing several of the 52 miles on the Owyhee after our motor died last week at the end of a rafting trip. Figure 1 | Location of the Owyhee Dam. The float on the Owyhee occurs over a short window, one which was described by Tim Belden in a recent blog. In happenstance, both Tim and I were on the river at the same ... » read more | |
| Thursday May 30, 2024 | |
| Much of the discussion tied to renewables so far in 2024 has revolved around solar generation, and the great leaps made in installed capacity and MW hitting the grid in markets all across the country. In the Midwest and Northeast, both PJM and MISO are seeing significantly increased solar generation and MISO is seeing the added solar impacting evening price formation despite solar penetration still remaining relatively low. ERCOT is seeing market disruptions of its own with its version of the duck curve and capacity concerns tied to structural demand growth have left the evening ramp exposed in such a way as to depart from the way thermal resources have been dispatched historically, with ERCOT’s coal units now behaving more like peakers plants. We’ve ... » read more | |