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| Thursday Mar 20, 2025 | |
| The spring season brings with it volatile weather conditions, especially within the South Central region known as ERCOT. Over the past couple of days, we have seen temperatures rise to 82 degrees in Houston while inland topped the 85 degree marker, which in turn had an impact on the actual load profile. On the supply side, wind generation has been stout earlier in the week while yesterday saw a slight shift down. There has been congestion in play from West to all other trading hubs as the stout wind stitched together with some transmission constraints led to the midday and evening ramp prices to diverge from the rest of the grid. Today’s wind level has shifted dramatically lower while the power demand profile is muted as temperatures are looking to pull back ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 19, 2025 | |
| In our last blog about Alberta, we focused on the cold during the month of February. It was the coldest since 2021 with over 1400 cumulative HDDs. By the end of the month, temperatures flipped warmer than normal, and the trend carried through a good portion of March. Over the weekend, there was another short stint of cold days. Heating demand rose while wind generation fell, but ultimately, the grid had more than enough megawatts to go around. Now the province is looking forward to some warm weather as the season transitions from winter to spring. Figure 1 | Actual Temperatures and Differences from Normal for Alberta Just in time for the first day of spring, Alberta is expecting well-above normal temperatures. Today highs are expected to be over 40 degrees, as shown below in the forecast ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 18, 2025 | |
| The U.S. power grid is undergoing a major transformation as renewable energy adoption accelerates across all independent system operators (ISOs). Areas with minimal past renewable energy generation are now experiencing a surge in solar and wind projects, while long-established renewable markets are expanding their energy mix. This shift is reshaping grid dynamics, market behaviors, and energy price trends. However, as more solar and wind capacity is added, the value of these resources declines due to price suppression during peak generation periods, raising critical questions about long-term market impacts. Figure 1 | Renewable Market Share Over Time for US ISOs This annual whitepaper builds on our previous analysis from March 2023, incorporating two additional years of data and ... » read more | |
| Monday Mar 17, 2025 | |
| Spring is often thought of as a season of rebirth, as the greys and browns of winter turn into the greens of new leaves and the kaleidoscope of colors we catch with the first flowers. The infrastructure of both power and gas market go through their own rebirths in this stretch of time. Instead of the “season of love” we refer to this stretch of time as “outage season”. With winter over, and summer still a ways away, we sit at a consistent lull in terms of demand. That gives us all the opportunity to get done much needed repairs. However, out of action pipelines, transmission, and generators create their own challenges. With so much supply out of action, otherwise unimpressive stresses on the system can quickly create tight conditions. Spring for the power and gas ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 14, 2025 | |
| JP Morgan recently released its 15th Annual Energy Paper titled “Heliocentrism – Objects may be further away than they appear.” The theme of the report is that energy transitions take a long time (objects may be further away than they appear) and those who believe that rapid growth in solar and energy storage (heliocentrists) will render the need for complementary thermal power generation unnecessary are mistaken. The report has a large dose of Vaclav Smil thinking and is well worth the read. The report had one figure which caught my attention. The figure below, which relies on data from NERC, shows MISO’s reserve margin declining over time. If my memory is correct, the lowest reserve margin I’ve seen from a NERC Summer Assessment or Winter Assessment is ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 13, 2025 | |
| Tariffs and trade wars have dominated the news cycle for much of the past two weeks, kicked into high gear upon the announcement of new taxes on imports from Canada and Mexico, including a 25% charge on many goods and 10% on trades tied to the energy space. Since then the talk among market participants has been rife with uncertainty given the back-and-forth between the Trump administration and the US’s international trading partners—each day new announcements coming of exemptions to a new set of goods or delays pushing back some of the tariffs until later in the spring. We also saw Canada announce retaliatory taxes in response, including Ontario announcing a 25% surcharge on electricity flows into the US earlier this week on Monday, only to backtrack hours ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 12, 2025 | |
| The ERCOT battery fleet is close to a breakthrough as the fleet attempts to cross the 5.0 GW dispatch record for the first time. The figure below is featured in our ERCOT daily battery dashboard. The blue represents charge from the ERCOT battery fleet while the orange represents discharge. The red is real-time hub price. We’ve covered the transition of the ERCOT fleet from mostly participating in the ancillary service market to attempting to capture day-ahead and real-time arbitrage in the last couple of years. The echoing of the real-time price shape in the discharge pattern shows how far the fleet has come in entering the day-ahead and real-time markets, as higher prices result in higher dispatch from the fleet. Last Wednesday and this Monday both saw triple-digit pricing in ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 11, 2025 | |
| There is a lot going on in the energy space these days as the power sector continues to push the renewable transition while integrating structural load growth tied to the artificial intelligence movement. On the natural gas side of the equation, the political arena around tariffs is front and center while the Russia/Ukraine negotiations are made for television while the two countries continue to battle on the front line. The colder Q1-2025 made a dent in the gas storage volume to which the natural gas forward curve has moved up as a price signal for production is needed. On Friday, we published the EnergyGPS weekly roundup highlighting the products available to clients, exploring what is happening in the consulting world and offering links to current content delivered. We ... » read more | |
| Monday Mar 10, 2025 | |
| Dinah Washington’s 1959 song, “What a Difference a Day Makes” opens with the lines “24 little hours, Brought the sun and the flowers”. Since then, the phrase has come tor present the unpredictable nature of life, with lows and highs often close together. In the CAISO’s grid last week, 24 little hours took away the sun and the flowers. The chart below shows the ISO’s generation stack by resource and hour, and the difference one day can make. Figure 1 | CAISO Generation Stack, March 4th & 5th Of note in the figure above are solar generation (yellow), thermal generation (red) and SP15’s real time LMP (light blue). Between the daylight hours of the 4th and 5th, clouds streamed in off the Pacific to cover most of the state. This more than ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 7, 2025 | |
| If you lived or were growing up in the greater New York Metropolitan region anytime during the 1970s and 80s, you might have known this guy in Figure 1. His name was Jerry Carroll, an actor better known as the television pitchman for Crazy Eddie, a regional consumer electronics chain. Jerry, and the company, was best known for its television ads in the Tri-State region for two decades with the tagline “Crazy Eddie’s Prices Are Insane!” And the last word was pronounced “INSAAAAANNNE!” Jerry was so into the part, so absolutely unhinged in his pitches, that most people thought he was Crazy Eddie, because in his commercials, he really came across as pretty nuts, or at least consuming large amounts of drugs. Turns out he ... » read more | |