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| Monday Dec 6, 2021 | |
| The Pacific Northwest has gone from moderate temperatures last week to that of a nice chill up and down I-5, specifically Seattle and Portland. The fluctuation in temperatures will continue this week with the next day or two holding just above the freezing level when it comes to the overnight temperatures whereas the latter part of the week is calling for the potential of lower level snow due to some areas down into the upper 20’s with daytime highs in the lower 40’s. This will be the first real cold temperature pattern of the winter, which has started out with the atmospheric river system wreaking havoc on the area just north of Seattle and in the lower southwest corner of British Columbia. Figure 1 | Flooding – Vancouver, BC area in late November 2021 The ... » read more | |
| Friday Dec 3, 2021 | |
| The duck curve in CAISO is a well-talked-about phenomenon: during the middle of the day, as solar comes online, it makes a dent in the net load (net load is defined as load minus wind and solar), and the size of the dent has grown over time as more solar has been installed. Plotting several years’ worth of net load data on a single chart results in a distinctive duck shape: Figure 1: CAISO average net load by year from 2013-2020. Credit CAISO, via https://thehub.agl.com.au/articles/2020/03/explainer-the-duck-curve. This has always been a phenomenon unique to the CAISO. However, ERCOT has built out solar at a rapid pace over this past year, and the same sort of shape has begun to show up occasionally in ERCOT net loads. Figure 2: ERCOT average wind and solar generation by month ... » read more | |
| Thursday Dec 2, 2021 | |
| Over the past few days, ERCOT has delivered some price spikes come the real-time market’s morning and evening ramp block of hours. You can clearly see from the graph below that we are not talking near capacity levels by any means but the simple fact that both intraday real-time periods mentioned are outpacing that of the day-ahead is noteworthy. Figure 1 | ERCOT North Real-Time vs. Day-Ahead Price and Power Demand Profiles – Hourly The top pane represents the North zone hourly day-ahead (blue) vs. that of the real-time hourly settles (orange). You can see that the jump up in price started to show up during the evening ramp on the 28th and escalated on the 29th only to fall back in line with the day-ahead over the past couple of days with both markets giving the ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Dec 1, 2021 | |
| “I can guarantee the lights will stay on…” Texas Governor Greg Abbott made that statement to an Austin radio station last week. The comment was in response to a report issued by FERC and the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) warning that ERCOT is still at risk of substantial blackouts this winter should intense winter conditions return. Figure 1 | Texas Governor Abbott, who recently issued a guarantee there will not be power outages this winter due to cold-weather events as seen last winter and previous winters. Image via Houston Chronicle. The crux of the FERC/NERC report was that a hefty chunk of last February’s power and gas system outages could have been avoided if generation owners and pipeliners had implemented previous ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Nov 30, 2021 | |
| A month ago we sent a blog about the recent approval of the California Public Utilities Commission to increase the capacity at the beleaguered Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility just north of Los Angeles from 34 to 41 BCF. This was done in the aftermath of one of a a recent reliability study that concluded that the SoCal Gas system was inadequately supplied through the peak demand days of winter. SoCal Gas could easily run into curtailment problems if a one in fifty year event showed up in Southern California like it did in Texas last February. After three week of injections this month the cavern has finally met the mandated inventory increase just as we turn the calendar page into December. While this is all intended to provide reliable service on the ... » read more | |
| Monday Nov 29, 2021 | |
| The latest models are continuing the warm pattern across most of the West and Rockies with normal conditions throughout the East and Midwest. In the WSI commentary they are cautioning that the persistence of the pattern suggests warmer risks ahead as the Alaskan ridge is likely to shift. Until some polar air can build north of the border the East has nothing to build on for colder conditions. The area with the biggest change since last week is the South Central which has now wavered back to above normal through the middle of December. Figure 1 | HDD Changes from Wednesday to Sunday Nov 28 Due to the warm conditions and drop off in wind for this week the SPP and ERCOT combined net load is going to post near 45 GWa. That is approximately 8 GWa higher than last week which ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Nov 24, 2021 | |
| I first got started in the natural gas world in Summer 2010. That November, weather across the Lower 48 was trending fairly warm; no significant cold bursts had hit. As December approached, I recall the more seasoned veterans in our group exclaiming: “If we weather doesn’t show up in the next couple of weeks then winter is over.” Being new to the gas world, the idea that a season could be over before it ever really got started struck me as quite odd. But this was a few years into the heart of the shale boom, so I needed to get my head around the fact that there was so much production about to hit the market, that – at some point – if enough space was not cleared out of storage, there would be no need for prices to print premiums over ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Nov 23, 2021 | |
| Last week we presented an issue with the coal operations in the Midwest and Mid Atlantic where output had fallen in response to recent announcements that supply chain issues have constrained operations. Combined PJM and MISO around the clock coal output fell 14 GWa combined during the second week of October. Since then the dispatch of coal on the grid has stayed near all time lows set during the COVID pandemic in Q2 2020. The switch in the dispatch has also set new records for October and November power burns in the two regions. Combined the natural gas consumed for generation is posting 2.7 BCF per day higher than last year. As of yet there is no end to the coal curtailments and as heating demand ramps up into December the power burns are set to continue the record levels absent a ... » read more | |
| Monday Nov 22, 2021 | |
| We’ve seen the impact of the expanded wind capacity in SPP throughout 2021. With about 2 GW of wind buildout compared to this time last year, average generation from wind in the region was 1.8 GW higher this past September than in September of 2020, 1.3 GW higher in October, and 500 MW higher so far through the month of November. The easiest place to see the impact of the increased number of wind projects in SPP, however, has been in the curtailment numbers. Wind curtailments during October represented nearly 12% of all potential wind generation, an all time high. Furthermore, 34% of all wind generation occurred during hours when the SPP North LMP was less than $0. During November the numbers have dropped slightly to just under 9% of all potential wind ... » read more | |
| Friday Nov 19, 2021 | |
| The Northwest Power Pool (NWPP) hosted a webinar this week on the Western Resource Adequacy Program (WRAP), formerly known as the Northwest Resource Adequacy (RA) Program. The WRAP is progressing forward and entering the first non-binding Forward Showing (FS) program (Phase 3A). Figure 1 | The WRAP timeline Source: NWPP Important upcoming activities include getting FERC approval for the program and demonstrating results from the first non-binding compliance period. Here’s a summary of some of what is at the forefront of people’s minds. Governance | There were a lot of comments and discussion on governance of the program. Some concerns include representation of members of Load Serving Entities (LSE) who currently do not have representation other than ... » read more | |