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| Tuesday Oct 15, 2024 | |
| Typically, the month of October is the time when the weather changes, with the transition from summer conditions to autumn cooler temperatures. However, it has not been the case across the Southwest Power Pool region as Mother nature delivered some heat during the first half of this month (October). We see that in the matrix below which displays the cooling degree days (CDDs), by showing the difference from the normal conditions, with the red color indicating much above normal conditions and purple showing the opposite. Except for the two days of October where we observed below normal conditions, the month of October has been unusually warm. Figure 1 | South SPP CDD – Departure from Normal As a result, the energy demand has been strong this month, much higher than the levels ... » read more | |
| Monday Oct 14, 2024 | |
| October arrived with a bang to the West’s natural gas markets. In recent blogs we have already covered the shifts in energy market fundamentals which drove up October pricing, where unseasonal heat overlapped with the start of outage season. Last week upped the ante as that tightness translated to price spikes. The critical factor was congestion, as California’s north became an island, unable to draw in MWs from surrounding regions while Sacramento scorched. Figure 1 | CAISO Day Ahead Transmission Market by Region The table above shows the regional LMP and cost of congestion across CAISO regions. The standout feature is the elevated prices in NP15/PGAE compared to their southern neighbors. California does not publish transmission data from their critical path 15 and path 26 ... » read more | |
| Friday Oct 11, 2024 | |
| We may be approaching the end of the Washington Cap and Invest Program. In just a few weeks, residents of the Evergreen State will be casting votes to either repeal or keep the Program. It could be the end of a Program that we have referred to as a Wild Roller Coaster ride with huge price swings driven by policy rather than fundamentals. From a pricing perspective, there are three ways the program can go from here. First, if the program is repealed carbon prices will no longer exist in Washington. Second, if the program is not repealed it may link with the California\Quebec market. In this outcome it is likely that the carbon price will settle at a price near the current California carbon price because of the relative size of each market. Finally ... » read more | |
| Thursday Oct 10, 2024 | |
| The month of October is displaying some extreme weather events starting with Hurricane Helene and Milton and ending with the above normal temperatures seen across the Westcoast states. In between the two are daytime highs in the low 80’s in the Upper Midwest while the South Central is holding its power demand profile while the wind is fluctuating. Figure 1 | Impact of Hurricanes and/or Tornados Starting with the hurricanes mentioned, the devastation around the two storms is massive as Helene stretched into part of the country that were once deemed safe from catastrophic events that make landfall along the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic Ocean coastline. Milton made landfall yesterday evening so the daylight hours will start to show the damage created by the category 3 ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Oct 9, 2024 | |
| With the month of September, comes the start of fall sports. NFL games take priority on the TV while nearby parks become crowded during local soccer practice and games. In our latest monthly report, we use the metaphor of showcase events, where club teams travel across the country to play in front of coaches for universities and pro teams, to explain the events in the energy space of the past month. Read on for a sneak peak of ‘September Showcase’. Figure 1 | Showcase Events Starting with the result of the September Energy Showcase, the graph below delivers the storyline on the natural gas front as the month started with the prompt month contract holding down the fort just under $2.00 with the first few days in the month pushing it higher by $0.20 ($2.10). After a week ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Oct 8, 2024 | |
| The first week of SPP was remarkable as mother nature delivered some late summer heat, driving energy demand up. From the first pane in the graph below, we have real-time and forecast load with the former represented by the shaded area and the latter in the form of a line, which applies to the other panes in this graph for real-time and forecast values. Load was elevated during this period, especially between 10/3 and 10/5, peaking at 40 GW. On the supply side, the wind generation was decent, with a couple of days with robust generation, notably on 10/2, 10/3, 10/5, which led to curtailments as, seen in the third pane from the top. As a result, net load was low, averaging in the low double digits on high wind days, as indicated in purple in the graph below. Figure 1 | SPP Daily ... » read more | |
| Monday Oct 7, 2024 | |
| California: the magic place where you can go to the beach on a 100+ degree day and by a pumpkin spice latte in the same season. While in other parts of North America people are digging up their winter coats, the Golden State found itself in a second summer. In a season of change Mother Nature decided to deliver more of the same. This brought us right back to the same, tight conditions of the summer gas and power markets. But in the case of the former, second summer was not like the first, with California’s spot gas prices rocketing up to previously unachievable heights. Figure 1 | 2024 Spot Gas Prices by Hub In some ways California’s start to October is very much like the summer before it. Triple digit highs in Sacramento? Check. High gas demand? Check. Good surfing? ... » read more | |
| Friday Oct 4, 2024 | |
| Growing up in the 1970s, a lot of my time and energy was spent riding my bike around to either play baseball, deliver newspapers, or buy comic books. Of the three hobbies, it was baseball really peaked my interest as it was and still is America's pasttime sport. The professional teams of that era were iconic and enduring as players tended to stay with teams for multiple years, and to my opinion, the most dominant of the time was the Cincinnati Reds, aka “The Big Red Machine”, stocked with talent and anchored by baseball’s all-time hit leader Pete Rose, aka “Charlie Hustle”. Pete died this past week, and I was thinking about his approach to baseball, not his indiscretions about gambling, which was to run as fast as he could for ... » read more | |
| Thursday Oct 3, 2024 | |
| With another cycle coming to an end earlier this week, the Pacific Northwest hydro system is looking at another change-over of the calendar as we had the kick-off the 2025 water year on Tuesday, October 1st. It’s a change-over period at Energy GPS as well, as we put together our full monthly hydro forecast for the new water year. Our forecast models flows at 60 dams throughout Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana as combination of starting reservoir elevations, projected dam operations throughout the water year tied to drafting for flow augmentation and flood risk management calculations, and support for salmon populations, migration, and breeding, unregulated water volumes from precipitation and snowpack leading to run-off entering the river system, and key ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Oct 2, 2024 | |
| With the start of October yesterday, shoulder season and the nuclear outages that come with it are firmly upon us. We wrote a report back in August about our expectations for this fall’s nuclear outage season. Based on historical patterns, we looked at fall 2018 as the template for this year’s potential. As nuclear plants go out for refueling every 18 or 24 months, we needed to go back 6 years to find a season when a similar list of plants would be offline for maintenance. Turns out, fall 2018 had a very high number of outages, peaking at 16.8 GW in September and over 24 GW in October. In contrast, the last two fall nuclear seasons peaked under 12 GW in September and just over 21 GW in October. In this blog, we’ll check in on how this outage season is progressing thus ... » read more | |