Featured Articles
| Tuesday Sep 20, 2016 | |
| Over the years we have become accustomed to seeing rain events have a negative effect on load. After all, cool wet weather typically reduces the demand for air conditioning. This week we are seeing a very interesting weather pattern develop over Southern California. While the Los Angeles Basin has daytime highs warm to the mid 90's, monsoon winds from the south are bringing cloud cover and rain to the Inland Empire and Colorado River region. The green area in Figure 1 just happens to reside right over the new large scale solar installations in the California ... » read more | |
| Monday Sep 19, 2016 | |
| Over the weekend a couple of things occurred that has made the Gulf of Mexico region 1.3 to 1.5 BCF longer compared to last Tuesday. The first is tied to the September outage that has been scheduled at Sabine. The 1.2-1.3 BCF of flows were suppose to shift down earlier in the month but due to some delays and a set of storms moving through the region, the gas noms remained high. It was not until this past Tuesday that things started to change as gas noms at the facility went from taking 1.0 BCF down to .02 BCF on Sunday. Figure 1 | Sabine Gas Noms - ... » read more | |
| Friday Sep 16, 2016 | |
| One of the biggest developments over the last two years in renewable procurement has been the rise of the corporate PPA. Corporate and Industrial (C&I) eclipsed utilities as buyers of wind PPA’s in 2015. According to the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Business Renewable Center, there were 1.18 GW of renewable corporate PPAs in 2014 and 3.24 GW in 2015. Figure 1 is a graphic put together by Renewable Choice showing the number of C&I PPAs over time. Figure 1 | Aggregate PPA Deals in the C&I ... » read more | |
| Thursday Sep 15, 2016 | |
| As of September 7th, HE 20 MST Palo Verde Unit 1 tripped offline due to a stuck open pressurized main spray value. The next morning, NRC posted that the unit itself was 100% offline and would continue to stay offline until the situation was resolved. Figure 1 | NRC Notes on Palo Verde Unit 1 As a result of the unit being offline, the Desert Southwest flows into California started to shift down on the 8th but really dropped for the CAISO day-ahead market on the 9th. Figure 2 | Palo Verde Day-Ahead Flows - Hourly Heavy Load Hours Figure 2 illustrates this as the ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Sep 14, 2016 | |
| Looking at the most recent weather models we are seeing a brief cold spell spread across the Midwest in the short-term, followed by a wave of above normal temperatures which sweep across the entire US through the end of the month. Above normal temperatures are nothing new this summer as prolonged heat across the country has kept gas demand (power burns) strong, which has helped eat away as the big surplus of gas in storage coming out of a warm winter. However, as we enter the back half of September it is important we adjust our expectations as ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Sep 13, 2016 | |
| Most of the market was surprised to see the front NYMEX natural gas contract up 10 cents as they walked in the door yesterday morning. After all, North American load had dropped to fall like levels after a very hot summer and there was no heat in the forecast. Saturdays load was expected to be right at the same levels witnessed over the Labor Day weekend. If that materialized, then we could expect natural gas power burns to drop down to 30 BCF or lower for Saturday and Sunday. That did not happen. Most market participants were surprised to see that the power burns ... » read more | |
| Monday Sep 12, 2016 | |
| With the middle of September upon us, Mother Nature continues to give the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic summer-like weather with highs in New York City tapping 90 degrees this Wednesday while Boston is looking at the mid 80's as its high. Figure 1 | New York City Temperatures - Actual and Forecast From a natural gas perspective, this is one of the reasons the overall power burns stayed above the 30 BCF mark over the weekend. Figure 2 | US Power Burns - Daily Another reason is due to the coal generation shifting down in both MISO and SPP over the weekend while the ... » read more | |
| Friday Sep 9, 2016 | |
| This week we found a CAISO report that piqued our interest. Buried in an unmarked spot on the CAISO website is the “Daily Wind and Solar Curtailment Report.” Below is a screen shot of the data contained in the CAISO report: Table 1 | CAISO Daily Wind and Solar Curtailment Report Sample http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Wind_SolarReal-TimeDispatchCurtailmentReportSep07_2016.pdf This report is intriguing because of the level of detail provided and the breakdown of the data. Here is a brief description of each column: Date and Hour – These are date/time ... » read more | |
| Thursday Sep 8, 2016 | |
| For those who do not live in the western world, the Pacific Gas and Electric Baja Path is a stretch of natural gas transport that connects volumes flowing to Southern California to the Bay Area in Northern California. Combined with the Redwood path connecting natural gas supply from Canada, the two pipes make up the main arteries that supply the Bay area population. With the ever changing natural gas landscape in California (Aliso Canyon) over the next few months and into 2017 there will be big changes to the pricing and flow of natural gas on each of these ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Sep 7, 2016 | |
| Over Labor Day weekend the United States experienced what has proven to be a rare event this summer as average temperatures fell near normal. The brief downturn in the weather conditions coupled with diminished holiday demand drove US net load below 300 GWa for Saturday and Sunday. Figure 1| North America Net Load The mild weather was short lived as a heat wave moves through US this week, pushing net load let back above 380 GWa for Thursday. However, looking past the initial 5 day forecast we see substantial downside in the ... » read more | |
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