Featured Articles
| Monday Feb 29, 2016 | |
| Last week we discussed the potential for an uptick wind development in the Pacific Northwest stemming from the 50% RPS bill that is making its way through the Oregon legislative process and the California 50% RPS requirements. The Oregon 50% RPS legislation is not a done deal, but it seems likely that if it doesn’t make it through the legislature in this session (ends in early March) it will likely be put on the ballot or will be re-introduced next year. These are great developments for the Northwest wind community. We haven’t seen activity like this in ... » read more | |
| Friday Feb 26, 2016 | |
| December was exceptionally warm in the Midwest, with Chicago temperatures averaging 10 degrees above normal for the month. Temperatures even reached a balmy 60 degrees around Christmas. Correspondingly, regional heating demand fell well below prior years. Sendouts averaged 9.8 bcf/d for the month, compared with 11.6 bcf/d in 2014 and 12.4 bcf/d in 2013. Accordingly, the Midwest region ended December with about 983 BCF of gas in storage, slightly above the previous 5-year maximum: Figure 1 | EIA Midwest Weekly Storage The hangover from the exceptionally warm December ... » read more | |
| Thursday Feb 25, 2016 | |
| As we discussed last week in one of the newsletters, both ERCOT and SPP saw record max wind hit their system. Such an increase, by default, is going to have an impact on the overall net power demand but it was not until I looked at the graph below did I realize just how much (some of it has to do with warmer temperatures the overall peak demand down, but most is due to the increasing wind capacity in ERCOT. Figure 1 | ERCOT's Net Load - Daily As you can see from the graph, we are well below the past two year's peak demand and the forecast is calling for that spread ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Feb 24, 2016 | |
| The end of Winter is in sight with less than a week remaining in February and the March NYMEX HH contract approaching expiration. Since early last week, the March contract has steadily declined as warm weather proliferated across the country. In light of recent HDD forecasts for early march, we believe the decline in the gas market is likely to continue. On the morning of the 22nd the outlook for the first week in March was relatively strong compared what we have seen thus far this winter as HDDs in the East were expected to be well above ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Feb 23, 2016 | |
| The powerburn analysis for the month of February can be divided into the front half of the month and the back half. Figure 1 | US Powerburns - Daily 7 Day Rolling Average As you can see in Figure 1, the front half of the month showed more power burns, with the majority of the output showing up in the South Central where ERCOT's net demand was stronger. The Midwest/East saw a little an uptick as well due to a barrage of nuclear units tripping during one of the cold snaps early in the month. Figure 2 | Nuclear Outages - Daily As we got to the back half of the ... » read more | |
| Monday Feb 22, 2016 | |
| Sunday's CAISO auction results were quite interesting as each major gen hub as well as the tie point nodes we track in our LMP email has the heavy load average clear under the light load average. Figure 1 | EnergyGPS CAISO LMP Tables - Flow Date 2/21/2016 Leading up to these results, we have been seeing Malin's node settling in with the heavy load hours under the light load hours. From a fundamental standpoint, this situation has been discussed and debated for some time now that solar and wind capacity has grown within the state, with the former impacting the ... » read more | |
| Friday Feb 19, 2016 | |
| Over the past 24 hours, ERCOT has seen its wind generation hit record levels over a block of hours within a day for the month of February. Figure 1 | ERCOT Wind Generation - Hourly Figure 2 shows the daily average wind generation across ERCOT for the 18th and how it compares to the past six months. What stands out is the 18th is showing a record high for that time period, which is an all-time high since wind capacity has grown in ERCOT over the past year. Figure 2 | ERCOT Daily Average Generation When you overlay the ERCOT load with the wind generation, you ... » read more | |
| Thursday Feb 18, 2016 | |
| As we head into the back third of February, most of the colder weather is behind us as the Northeast is starting to come out of the frigid weekend, the Midwest is balmy, Texas is net longer due to wind picking up and its load shifting down and the West is just downright warm, especially in Southern California where daytime highs are in the mid/upper 70's and expected to be back up in the upper 80's by this coming Monday/Tuesday. Figure 1 | Burbank Temperatures - Actual vs Forecast Since it is still the middle of February, this transition to the warmer weather ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Feb 17, 2016 | |
| As natural gas and oil prices hit multi-year lows heading into this winter there were many questions about how the supply stack would respond. The questions mainly circulated around whether gas prices would rise high enough to induce the same level of coal and oil generation we had seen the previous two years. As temperatures remained above normal and gas prices failed to get off the ground, it seemed that fuel switching would be a non-factor this winter. However, this weekend we saw temperatures plummet in the East of the country. Despite ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Feb 16, 2016 | |
| The Pacific Northwest wind development industry has been contracting since the California “Bucket” rules were passed in 2011. The Bucket rules require California utilities to procure the vast majority of their RPS obligations from in-state resources. New long term deals from Northwest wind projects came to a halt immediately. After a seven year stretch where more than 4,000 MW of wind capacity was installed in BPA’s service territory, development of new wind in the Northwest came to a screeching halt. Since the middle of 2012 installed wind capacity ... » read more | |
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