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| Friday May 27, 2022 | |
| Reversion to the Mean? Who the heck knows where natural gas prices are going? As of yesterday, the price of natural gas for delivery in 2023 was $5.93 per MMBtu. One year ago, the 2023 price was $2.62. Mr. Market along with many others are scratching their heads as to why and like anything else that trades for the future, there are a lot of ways to think about such natural gas prices. The image below shows historic natural gas prices from 1997 through 2022 along with 2023 to 2035 forward prices as of March 25, 2021 (blue) and March 25, 2022 (orange). The simple average historical price from 1997 through 2022 is $4.30 per MMBtu. One common theory for commodity prices is a random walk with reversion to the mean. That is, prices move up and down but tend to return to the mean. The ... » read more | |
| Thursday May 26, 2022 | |
| At the end of last week, PJM was facing very tight grid conditions as a heat wave settled over the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast starting on Thursday and extending into the weekend. Temperatures rose over 90 degrees on Friday afternoon across large swathes of PJM, MISO, and the Southeast. The conditions stressed the PJM grid at a point when there are still units on outage for spring maintenance, and high coal costs on top of recent coal retirements as well as further retirements looming in the future tapped out the available thermal output within PJM’s borders. Our latest Newsletter Special Report, “Setting the Stage for a ‘Battle of the Megawatts’ in PJM and MISO this Summer” walks through the events of the past week as PJM needed to ... » read more | |
| Wednesday May 25, 2022 | |
| The Southwest Power Pool (SPP) has been known as the highest wind to power demand ratio region within the Lower 48. This is quite impressive considering most of the press it tied to California’s renewable mandates through policy and what ERCOT has been able to do over the years. When it is all said and done, SPP has a lot going on when it comes to the wind penetration and now with what is happening in the Midwest and East markets, the transmission is just as valuable as the West market participants deemed it over the past few years. Throw in the fact that SPP has just as much exposure to the uptick in natural gas prices and we have a market transitioning from curtailments to figuring out where their megawatts want to go and for what price. Figure 1 | ... » read more | |
| Tuesday May 24, 2022 | |
| When there is a problem in the energy sector, the solution is to send a price signal at it until it goes away. When supply is greater than demand, the signal is downward trending while the opposite is true when demand is greater than supply. The actual price movement is modest when the balancing act sits within the first standard deviation of a normal distribution curve. The more extreme price moves show up as the grid gets stretched to the tail end events. Back in 2015, the fracking technology put the Marcellus/Utica region on the map and ultimately put plenty of production into circulation all the while other regions were increasing their natural gas output. This led to regional basis cash trading hubs to drop below the production marginal cost levels on ... » read more | |
| Monday May 23, 2022 | |
| Over the past couple of years, the pandemic has changed the how we view the world as the days of talking on an office telephone has been replaced with some sort of headset that connects to one’s home computer and some communication application such as Zoom, Skype or the popular Microsoft Teams. The communication change comes in handy as many still can work from home and it is a nice way to bring the presence of team members to the forefront all the while some dreamy background is on display as we all still figure out a way to fight through the changes that are now present in everyday life. Speaking of changes to the everyday life, many individuals are feeling the brunt of the cost of gasoline as they need to fill up their tanks as they must commute to their jobs a few days a ... » read more | |
| Friday May 20, 2022 | |
| The past month has been a tale of volatility in ERCOT. Since April 20, we have released no fewer than five ERCOT Market Flashes detailing the swings that the market has taken due to a variety of factors—renewables that are growing tremendously year-on-year, the new ORDC rule changes introducing higher pricing at lower net load levels, and extreme tightness stemming from sudden unit outages. To take a look at some of the major events of the last 30 days, we’ll briefly pick out some of the highlights from each of the five ERCOT market flashes we’ve published recently. Wind Giving Way to Solar in ERCOT Curtailments On April 20, we discussed the increasing amounts of renewable curtailments in ERCOT this year compared to prior years. Of course, renewable curtailments ... » read more | |
| Thursday May 19, 2022 | |
| The transition from winter to spring in Texas over the past several weeks has brought the first glimpses of how ERCOT will respond to summerlike heat in its borders. As recently as the afternoon of last Friday, May 13, real-time prices at ERCOT’s Houston Hub climbed over $5,000. One pattern that has become apparent over the past month-and-a-half is that a significant amount of separation has grown in place between ERCOT’s price hubs. While Houston is firmly in place as ERCOT’s highest-priced region, the West Hub price has routinely been the lowest—and by a large amount, with the North and South Hubs sitting in-between. Looking over the past seven days in the figure below, on the days when prices rise in Houston, the West Hub often fails to ... » read more | |
| Wednesday May 18, 2022 | |
| As we turn the corner and work through the back half of May 2022, there are a couple of common themes that seem to be arising across the country. The first is the simple fact that the summer forecasts are calling for above normal temperatures across the Midwest, East and South Central all the while the inner West will be scorching hot while the Pacific Ocean coastal region might be saved for the second straight year. The second is the simple fact that the natural gas environment continues to try and find the price point that will either stimulate the production needed to balance or find a level that might trigger some demand reduction. The former is typically much easier than the latter, but the past few years have taught us nothing is normal anymore. Therefore, we ... » read more | |
| Tuesday May 17, 2022 | |
| There have been several energy related catastrophes over the past decade that have put pressure on the storage balancing in the state of California. The loss of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, The Aliso Canyon Storage Cavern rupture and the loss of L3000 and L4000 import pipelines into the SoCal Gas system are the main culprits in the saga. With the renewable push from wind, solar and now batteries and the recovery tied to the transport capacity over the past few years, the SoCal Gas system is as healthy as it has ever been. Unlike most caverns across North America, which are facing a large year on year inventory deficit, SoCal Gas has a large surplus that started with the CPUC granting the right to add an additional 7.2 BCF of storage capacity to the Aliso Canyon facility last ... » read more | |
| Monday May 16, 2022 | |
| This past weekend, I had the pleasure of traveling down to rural Iowa for my father-in-law’s celebration of life ceremony. Many who new good ole Marv Wente, he always had a story to tell either about fishing, the farm or selling sweet corn at the intersection of two state highways for years. My conversations with him were plentiful over the years as he would come out to visit and we would sit on the computer looking up the yield numbers, soil content and other attributes to the seeds he sold to his clients. It was quite the learning experience as the science behind developing crops continued to evolve. Figure 1 | Iowa Corn Growing Since Marv grew up on ‘the farm’ and sold seed corn at the local feed mill for years, he was aware of the ins/outs when it came ... » read more | |