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| Tuesday Nov 25, 2025 | |
| At EGPS, we keep our audience fully informed—not only through our Morning Reports, Monthly and Quarterly publications, but also through our Weekly Market Reports, which arrive in your inbox every weekend. These updates provide a clear snapshot of how the market evolved over the past several days and highlight what to watch as the new week takes shape. In last week’s report, we highlighted the market’s sensitivity to shifting weather expectations—an influence that continues to shape market sentiment as we head into the Thanksgiving holiday stretch. Over the weekend, the focus remained on the upcoming coldest weather pattern of the season for the Lower 48. Despite the anticipated drop in temperatures, front-month pricing eased slightly, as traders continue to ... » read more | |
| Monday Nov 24, 2025 | |
| In winter, nothing is more important to natural gas demand than cold weather and resulting heating demand. Utilities do not report on this form of demand directly. Instead, it gets lumped in with residential/commercial demand, aka ResCom. This bucket covers all molecules sent directly to residences and businesses and excludes demand from power plants. Gas demand from cooking, etc. does not see a major change across the season, so increases in ResCom equate to an increase in heating demand. Figure 1 | PGAE ResCom Demand Our first figure shows ResCom demand in PGAE, northern California’s biggest utility. In red, we see the current year, compared to 2024 (yellow) and 2023 (blue). Here, we see a very consistent pattern. In the warmest months of the year, this form of demand drops to a ... » read more | |
| Friday Nov 21, 2025 | |
| Written by Tim Belden The 16th Annual Portland Aluminum Man Competition (“AMC”) took place on a beautiful, sunny day in September in Portland, Oregon. The event is called “Aluminum Man” (think aluminum foil) because it is the opposite of an intense event such as Iron Man. The AMC consists of twelve men competing in a series of ten individual and team events. The first event starts at 8am and the final event ends around 11 pm. Teams are re-assigned after each event with the goal of ensuring that each participant is on a team with every other participant at least once during the day. In the end, we don’t crown a winner; instead, we crown a loser who becomes the Aluminum Man. After the ninth event, we tally the scores for each person. The guys in 11th and 12th ... » read more | |
| Thursday Nov 20, 2025 | |
| While overall hydro generation in the Pacific Northwest has been mostly stable so far this month—thanks in part to the ongoing chum spawning operation, that supports Lower Columbia flows to maintain the river level above 11.3 feet on the Bonneville tailwater from early November through close to the end of December, using stored water from behind Grand Coulee to augment flows if necessary—that is not to say that the Northwest has seen no changes in hydro-relevant conditions. After a fairly wet start to November, things have dried up significantly in recent days. While this is not having much of an impact on current flows or generation, it could have implications for later in the water year. Figure 1 | NWRFC ESP10 Jan-Jul Water Supply Forecast for The ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Nov 19, 2025 | |
| Last week marked the first taste of the upcoming winter season as temperatures across the middle of the country dropped. Snow fell across the Midwest while parts of Texas dipped near freezing temperatures. The figure below shows average aggregate temperatures for the Midwest, as well as differences from seasonal normals. After a slow start to autumn with summer-like temperatures for much of the first half of October, the second half of last month and the first week of November were closer to seasonal normals. Then the region fast forwarded to winter. On November 9th and 10th average Midwest temperatures fell more than 20 degrees below normal, dropping under freezing. With more frigid weather on the horizon, we’re looking back at how the Midwest handled this first winter test. Figure ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Nov 18, 2025 | |
| Mother Nature has been firmly in control across the SPP footprint this month, delivering a streak of well-above-normal temperatures that continues to dominate the 9–10 day outlook. The board shows widespread daytime highs in the 50s and 60s, with even typically colder northern cities such as Bismarck, Fargo, and Sioux Falls holding in the 40s–50s through much of next week—significant warmth for late November. Across the central and southern corridor, places like Wichita, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Amarillo consistently sit in the mid-50s to mid-60s, with overnight lows rarely approaching levels that would normally drive early-winter heating demand. This prolonged warm anomaly has kept systemwide load suppressed and has shaped the balancing dynamics throughout November ... » read more | |
| Monday Nov 17, 2025 | |
| Baseload resources describe the portion of the power generation stack that optimally produces a steady flow of MWs across all hours of the day. The most cut and dry example would be nuclear resources. Apart from a few weeks every year (refueling maintenance), these plants will run at full capacity regardless of intraday shifts in supply and demand. Thermal and hydro are not considered baseload as they have the ability to ramp their production depending on what is going on in the market. With the growth of solar generation, price signals increasingly push resources to “flex” their output, with the aim of dropping non-solar generation in the midday and pushing it up after the sun sets. Batteries have been introducted over the past few years as another resource that ... » read more | |
| Friday Nov 14, 2025 | |
| During the Energy GPS webinar, titled “Phase Shifting in the Renewable Space”, the opening discussion was tied to my drive from Portland to Minneapolis (and back) this past month. To make good progress on the 25 hour drive, it is important to start before the sun rises. On doing so, you come across flashing red lights on both sides of the interstate and in some places as far as the eyes can see. These lights are associated with specific wind turbines that in the daylight could be seen up and down the hillside and in the valleys. Figure 1 | Glitz and Glamour in the Renewable Energy Space Knowing that the wind turbines have not been around forever, the quantity of redness in the dark skies is a reminder of how mature the renewable space has become. The webinar highlighted ... » read more | |
| Thursday Nov 13, 2025 | |
| This week, Mother Nature delivered a (cold, not warm) welcome to winter to much of the country as the entire eastern half of the US received a blast of cold air. The cold started in the Midwest over the weekend and spread outward to peak just a couple of days ago on Tuesday. Parts of Pennsylvania and Vermont saw over 8 inches of snow and way down south in Jacksonville, Florida the temperature reached an all-time daily low of 28 degrees. While most of the affected areas have warmed back up and look to be back on a warmer trajectory, the event marked a shift in the expected pattern for the Northeast, where it doesn’t look so ready to return to the previous norm. The figure below plots daily HDDs across the East by region, with the past 30 days of actual ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Nov 12, 2025 | |
| The CAISO battery fleet continues to flex its impact on the CAISO grid. Over the last few years, the story of batteries in California has been one of growth. From a few projects across the state to the saturation of the regulation market to now increasingly high levels of energy dispatch, the fleet’s role is continuously changing. We track it all on our daily and monthly CAISO battery dashboards, as well as in our battery reports. The figure below is featured in our daily battery dashboard and shows net discharge to the grid in orange and net charge in blue over the last week. In the middle of the day when solar generation is abundant, batteries are enjoying lower real-time prices, especially in SP15, and charging in preparation for higher evening prices. In the evenings ... » read more | |