Menu
Featured Articles
| Friday Mar 31, 2023 | |
| Record-setting snow continues to pile up in the Sierra Mountains of California, and as a skier (living nowhere near California), I was curious about conditions. So, I peeked in on the ski report at Mammoth Mountain, right in the Central part of the State (again, nowhere near close to where I live). My eyes popped and my envy level soared: season to date, they’ve had 723 inches of snow, well above their season average of 400 inches. With a base depth (packed down) of up to 336 inches in places, you’d be skiing at times almost 30 feet above the mountain surface. And mountain base temperature forecast on 3/30 is 15 degrees F; so, it doesn’t look like we’re going to have a major melt anytime soon. Figure 1 below shows a screenshot of local news ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 30, 2023 | |
| While the hydro system in our neck of the woods up in the Pacific Northwest continues to deal with a very dry water year and cold weather extending past the winter and now into the spring to delay snow melt from feeding into the rivers, down in California the story is different with a bounty of moisture that has been building up for months and is starting to show up in the grid balancing. Our latest Newsletter Special Report, “LOM ME ASAP” digs into the landscape on the ground in California as renewables of all the different varieties from solar to batteries and now hydro are showing up like never before and are all set to play their roles in the weeks and months to come. The unexpected introduction of California hydro generation has put the CAISO grid operators on ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 29, 2023 | |
| The West has been wet and wild this winter with California buffeted by a seemingly never-ending series of atmospheric rivers. Similarly, the Desert Southwest is experiencing an abundance of water at the end of winter. The figure below from the Bureau of Reclamation shows snow water equivalent for the Colorado River Basin from this middle of March. Much of the snowpack that feeds into the Colorado River is saw over 100% of normal conditions. The Upper Colorado was at 142% of the median historical snowpack while the Lower San Juan was over 200% of its median levels. EnergyGPS has covered the increasingly dire situation at Glen Canyon and Hoover dams, most recently in ‘Leveraging Hoover and a New Low at Powell’. In the article, we looked into how this abundant water year is ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 28, 2023 | |
| ERCOT’s day-ahead hourly price settles have seen a nice little bump up during the evening ramp as the sun settles, power demand remains at a heightened level with little wind generation to speak of. Transitioning into the real-time, the system balancing is such that a higher price signal needs to be sent across all trading hubs during the short stint across the evening ramp period known as HE18-19. Figure 1 | ERCOT Hourly Price Action – North Zone The graph above puts on display the North Zone’s Day-ahead hourly settles (blue) against the real-time values (orange). The 27th mutes the other days as the real-time spiked up above the $700 mark, which was true for other trading hubs across ERCOT as well. The implied heat rate math was such that every ... » read more | |
| Monday Mar 27, 2023 | |
| One could see their breath this morning in Portland, OR, while letting the dog out at 3:30 am. In fact, it was cold enough that the cars parked in the driveways and on the street had a little frost on the windshields, which is another indication just how cold it is as we round out the month of March 2023. Figure 1 | Atmospheric G2 1-5/6-10 Day Forecast The images in the figure above have been a common theme all winter as the blue/purple coloration has encompassed the EIA Pacific region. The deeper coloration hovering over California has not directly impacted the overall power prices as of late but continue to deliver higher PGAE and SoCal Citygate cash prices as the natural gas storage levels have been depleted over the past 4.5 months. The colder temperatures ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 24, 2023 | |
| We’ve written previously about ERCOT’s “HE20” problem—as opposed to the evening ramp problem faced by CAISO, the tendency that’s been showing up recently for price spikes to occur for a couple of hours or less right around 8 pm, while load is still high, solar is ramping down, and wind hasn’t yet ramped up. Back on March 21st, a price spike appeared at 8 in the morning instead: Figure 1 | ERCOT RT Dashboard, 3/17/23 – 3/23/23 The top pane of the graph above shows ERCOT North RT prices (orange) and DA prices (blue). In addition to the morning price spike on the 21st, an “HE20” price spike also showed up the following day. While the problem of shifting supply in the evening has more potential to be exacerbated by high ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 23, 2023 | |
| This winter has been mild in the Southeastern United States with temperatures mostly above normal. However, mid-March brought a few days of cold with temperatures more than 12 degrees F colder than normal. The figure below shows an average composite temperature for the Southeast region for each day since the start of 2023 up until March 19th. The second panel displays differences from five-year normal with red bars representing warmer than usual and blue showing cold. The red mostly covers the figure while the cold in the middle of March stands out. With most of the eastern side of the country experiencing a warm winter, gas prices have been low and storage fuller than normal. Much of the normal winter coal-to-gas switching that occurs with heightened heating demand and high gas prices ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 22, 2023 | |
| Earlier this month the first new nuclear plant in the US in 7 years reached initial criticality, meaning operators have successfully created a nuclear reaction and produced heat needed for creating electricity. The plant, Vogtle Unit 3 in Georgia, won’t be fully online until May or June, but it’s a huge step for a project that experienced several costly delays. Once fully online, Unit 3 will be able to contribute 1.1 GW of generation to the grid. You can keep track of the ramping on of the new unit by subscribing to EnergyGPS’s daily nuclear outage reports which lists outages for nuclear plants across the country. Figure 1 | Vogtle Unit 1 and Unit 3 Outages (March 14 – 21) Other older nuclear plants are attempting to stick around despite looming or passed ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 21, 2023 | |
| Over the past year, the Lower 48 natural gas production has grown in response to the elevation in pricing that was experienced worldwide. Most of the change in field receipts was posted in the Haynesville and Permian Basins with the latter correlated to the increase in crude oil production. North of the US Border, the production levels took advantage of the higher prices mentioned along with the overall capacity increases tied to pipes located in Western Canada to that of the Pacific Northwest. This has led the region to hit new all-time highs in both British Columbia and Alberta where the production level hit 18.5 BCF over the weekend. When you compared it to last year, the current level is running roughly 8% higher due to the fact that the Alberta numbers have displayed ... » read more | |
| Monday Mar 20, 2023 | |
| California is starting to look like the days of old when it comes to the renewable curtailments that are showing up over the weekend. The factors that play into curtailments range from thermal generators needing to stay on during the midday so the megawatts can be produced for the evening ramp period, a hydro landscape that continues its upward trajectory when it comes to snowpack and stream flows, and the simple fact that when wind shows up there is nothing to stop the system from slicing into the solar generation volume. Figure 1 | CAISO Solar Curtailments - Year on Year Comparison Starting with the thermal variable, this is something that has been in play for some time given the imports from the Pacific Northwest have not been showing up (for multiple reasons). The lack of ... » read more | |