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| Wednesday Mar 30, 2022 | |
| This March wraps up with power loads in ERCOT posting their highest daily flat averages in history, yet, this was not because temperatures were remarkable. Instead, this March continued to display the voracity of structural load growth in ERCOT. As April rolls in, it is instructive to look at how ERCOT's structural loads have shifted as a harbinger for how April load may behave. Figure 1 | ERCOT's daily flat average power loads this March were greater than any March in history. It is not simple enough to attribute this March's strong power loads to weather. Throughout the ERCOT market, the average temperatures this past March were pretty much right in line with historic averages. Figure 2 | March daily average temperatures in major ERCOT cities by year. This ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 29, 2022 | |
| The end of winter is upon us as the calendar turns to April on Friday. Not only is this the start of a new quarter on the calendar but the start of the natural gas injection season. The refill season has been contractually defined by the storage operators for decades as the seven-month period between April and the end of October where caverns shift operations from withdrawals to injections allowing inventory to build prior to the following winter. It is a crucial time for the rebuilding of stocks during the ‘low demand’ period of the year for the purpose of meeting reliability concerns. In the old days, the equation was as simple as supply was outpacing demand as the proliferation of new shale production was front and center, especially in the Northeast ... » read more | |
| Monday Mar 28, 2022 | |
| During spring break, the goal for individuals and/or families living in the northern portion of the country to find their way to a sunnier area such as San Diego, Mexico, Desert Southwest or take their flights to the Hawaiian Islands where the tropical weather and sunsets are to die for this time of year. If you live in the warmer weather climate, the target looks more like the slopes of Colorado or Utah as the snowcap mountains are in the line of site. Figure 1 | Spring Break Destinations If you live in Portland/Seattle and traveled to a destination mentioned above, your weekend return was met with overcast but warm weather both Saturday and Sunday with very little precipitation. Down in Southern California, the weekend was more like Pacific Northwest weather as ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 25, 2022 | |
| A couple of days ago, we published an article about the sustained high price spike that occurred rather unexpectedly in the CAISO. It was unexpected due to the fact that the current weather is temperate, demand is low, and conditions on the grid in general aren’t conducive to the kind of scarcity that we might expect to see in, say, August. But a number of factors aligned, including forecast error, generator outages, and a transmission constraint on the Paci line. Since the transmission constraints are likely to show up again in the near future, let’s take a look at what’s going on. First, some background information. The Pacific AC Intertie (Paci) connects the CAISO and the Pacific Northwest. The following chart shows some typical “days in the life” of the ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 24, 2022 | |
| Spring has officially arrived and, with it, we’ve entered the biannual refueling season for nuclear plants. This is the time of year when nuclear plants across the country take advantage of warming temperatures and lowered demand to do their regular maintenance. Usually occurring in 18 month or 24 month cycles, these outages can last over a month and come with short ramp up and ramp down periods before and after. The map below shows outages on March 23, 2022 across the country. The larger the blue circle, the larger the outage in megawatts, ranging from 0 to 1469 MW out. Plants with outages larger than 100 MW are labeled with their name. Figure 1 | Nuclear Outages for March 23, 2022 Many of these outages fall into the predictable outage schedule of spring and fall. » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 23, 2022 | |
| Back in February, we wrote about the potential impact of the ORDC rule changes on prices in ERCOT. The article or blog will provide more useful context, but in brief: the ORDC is ERCOT’s scarcity pricing mechanism. Following Uri, the PUCT made a couple of changes to the way the ORDC is calculated. We fed the changes into the ORDC calculation methodology published by ERCOT, and developed a “simplified” ORDC curve based on the new rules. Our conclusion at the time was that “the changes in ORDC calculation create the opportunity for more price spikes of a lower magnitude than have occurred historically.” So, is this playing out? We don’t have a ton of data yet to compare: February of last year is somewhat of an outlier, and March of this year isn’t ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 22, 2022 | |
| For readers of EGPS’ Canadian Energy reports, the phrase “Alberta wind set or will set a new all-time record” has progressively lost its luster by virtue of being repeated so frequently. This past Sunday, the latest high-water mark was set again when hourly wind topped 1.97 GW. Compared to a market like ERCOT, about 2 GW of wind may not seem like a lot. But in AESO, that can account for 20% of load on days like will be seen this week. AESO’s big wind days are to stay in effect into Thursday, but then take a hiatus that could be rather steep. The pattern AESO wind will follow over the next seven days will provide a good demonstration of what may be expected over the transition from Q1 to Q2: generally waning wind strength ... » read more | |
| Monday Mar 21, 2022 | |
| The single biggest change in grid operations for Texas over the past year has been the doubling of solar capacity installations. Each month more output is coming online and the total capacity is expected to break 13 GWa by June, according to the EIA. That puts the total output on par with California and should have Texas become the nation's leader in solar energy by the end of the summer. The state is not going to stop there. By the end of 2024 Texas is expected to have 24 GWa of installed solar capacity on the ERCOT grid. Hopefully they will learn some lessons from the California integration struggles. As the solar footprint grows, so does the problems with managing the intermittent qualities of the generation. Having such a large portion of the overall generation profile ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 18, 2022 | |
| Global LNG forward prices are backing away from recent record highs, and U.S. terminal maintenance season could be getting underway. Yet, more capacity to export from new terminals and spreads that still remain unquestionably profitable indicate U.S. LNG exports should rip this summer. Over the past several weeks, our EGPS LNG and EU Storage reports have spent a good amount of time discussing the extraordinary volatility of global forward prices. LNG forward prices have softened a bit from the record highs set at the start of the month, when concerns about global energy markets were ignited upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The average prices of Europe’s NBP gas hub’s Summer ‘22 strip topped out at an astonishing $49.39 on March ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 17, 2022 | |
| Wind has been plentiful over the past week in SPP, with wind generation reaching close to 20 GW at points on each of the past four days. With temperatures rising throughout the region starting around the same time and translating into lower overall demand, the result has been a familiar one to those who follow SPP—net loads of 5 GW or lower, lots of curtailed wind, and SPP Hub prices sitting below zero for hours at a time. Figure 1 | SPP Net Load – Actual and Forecast The figure below shows the SPP North day-ahead LMP for Wednesday the 16th as well as for today in the yellow and blue lines, respectively. Starting at midnight and lasting until the mid-to-late morning prices remain well below $0 and they dip below negative again at the very end of the day both today ... » read more | |