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| Friday Jun 20, 2025 | |
| We have developed a fundamentals-based Production Cost Model (PCM) for the WECC that provides 20+ years of hourly price forecasts at trading hubs and zones. The forecast can be used for resource valuation, resource adequacy and policy making decisions and our newly offered WECC Market Report includes a full discussion of market drivers, policy implications, price trends, and input uncertainties. One of the key drivers of our forecast is a modeling decision around how much capacity is added to the grid over the next 20+ years. To meet clean energy policy goals the amount of capacity far exceeds anything that has been added to the WECC in recent years by close to 2X. Making decisions on what is going to happen is difficult and impactful to the model outcomes. Take ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jun 19, 2025 | |
| It can be hard sometimes to tell when summer has arrived in the Pacific Northwest. The PNW saw a blast of warm weather early in the month but is now seeing much cooler conditions move back over the region, drawing temperatures in Portland back down below 60 degrees tomorrow and over the weekend, enough to make a person question if we’re back in early spring. Thankfully, the PNW hydro system is here to help relieve any confusion. A careful observer of generation along the Columbia River would have received a clue earlier this week as output for the four Lower Columbia dams showed a sharp jump upwards on the 16th, from 1.7 GW to 2.2 GW in a single day. Looking at generation from past years, we see a similar increase showing up on the 16th of June each year. ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jun 18, 2025 | |
| The Columbia Generating Station is coming back online after extended refueling maintenance. Work began back in April and the plant was completely offline for over 60 days. Refueling outages for Columbia happen every other spring but usually don’t start until the first week in May and only last a little over a month. The figure below shows outages for the nuclear plant going back to 2021. The refueling outages have a long lead up as the plant slowly powers down before going 100% offline for repairs. Unplanned outages are quicker and usually impact only a portion of the plant’s capacity. Figure 1 | Columbia Generation Station Outages, 2021 - 2025 (MW) Over the next several refueling outages, the plant will have additional work to complete. At the end of last month, BPA and ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jun 17, 2025 | |
| The Alberta market has been displaying some volatility over the past couple of weeks with the most recent activity showing up over the weekend. Over the next couple of days, the grid operations are going to be dealing with a wind generation profile that is all over the board and when the lower volume hits during the evening ramp is when the marginal cost of energy puts forth a climb to the top of the supply stack. Figure 1 | Alberta Real-Time Price Action Looking at the chart in Figure 1, when the stars align for power demand and the lack of wind generation, the solution boils down to the reliance of flexible resources that know where they are in the supply chain and can price closer to the cap level for brief stints. The flexibility comes from the adjacent regions such as BC and ... » read more | |
| Monday Jun 16, 2025 | |
| Climbing peaks is not for the faint of heart. Around Portland we have a couple. One is Mt. Saint Helens. This one is an “easy” summit. That is, if you consider climbing straight uphill for the better part of a day to be easy. Another is Mt. Hood. This one adds the dangers of rock fall, crevasses, and no fall zones to the uphill slog. The power industry has its own peaks, different in nature but just as steep and treacherous. Here, we refer to the sharp increase in electricity demand that occurs in the evening hours, as households up their energy usage and solar resources quit generating. Unlike our mountains, these peaks grow taller as we move into summer. They have also grown taller with each passing year as load growth increases the heights of demand, and increased solar ... » read more | |
| Friday Jun 13, 2025 | |
| Back on June 6th, we published our Monthly Renewable Report. This report contains a retrospective look at the prior month, and covers the performance of renewables and storage in CAISO, ERCOT, SPP, MISO, and PJM. The figure below comes from that report, and shows average battery dispatch in ERCOT by month and hour: Figure 1 | ERCOT Battery Dispatch, 2023 – 2025 YTD In addition to the strong year-over-year growth, the chart shows another trend: the annual evolution of the dispatch profile from two daily peaks of similar size, one in the morning and one in the evening, to a much stronger evening peak. The transition occurs in every year, and starts in March or April, gets stronger over the summer, and then starts to shift back around November. The explanation for the shift is ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jun 12, 2025 | |
| After a mild month during May we are seeing the transition to summer really pick up in PJM and the rest of the Northeast. Temperatures are climbing into the 90s later today along the coast in PJM taking the heat up a notch. This comes after last week’s first surge of warmth that pushed CDDs up close to double digits for several days, following a May where the region saw CDDs rise above zero only a handful of times. The figure below shows a comparison of past CDDs from May 1 through the present against the forecast for the coming 15 days as the warm days should be a sustained and consistent presence. Figure 1 | East CDDs, May and June Actuals and 15-Day Forecast We can see the expected impact on PJM in the figure below, which plots daily peak system load for the ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jun 11, 2025 | |
| By emergency order from the Department of Energy, the J H Campbell coal plant in Michigan must operate this summer. The order, issued on May 23rd, cites the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) summer reliability assessment (which we covered here) and declared an emergency for the Midcontinent ISO due to the possibility of an energy shortfall this summer. The coal plant was originally set to retire on May 31st as part of Consumers Energy’s goal to be coal free this year. Their transition plan includes replacing existing coal plants with renewables and more efficient natural gas plants. The chairman of the Michigan Public Service Commission has stated that bringing the plant back online after the decommissioning process has already begun will likely mean ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jun 10, 2025 | |
| Canada is once again battling wildfires this year, and we have been closely monitoring their impact—particularly on the natural gas landscape in Western Canada. The wildfires have intensified in the eastern and northeastern regions of Alberta, where a significant number have been classified as “out of control,” prompting urgent safety measures and evacuations in affected communities. In our recent natural gas morning reports for Western Canada, we discussed how these wildfires have affected the natural gas market, especially in the Oil Sands Delivery Area (OSDA), one of the key demand regions. Figure 1 | Alberta Wildfire Status Dashboard, June 9, 2025 – Government of Alberta & NGTL Map In Figure 1, the left map displays current wildfire status in ... » read more | |
| Monday Jun 9, 2025 | |
| To be in a pickle, in a bind, or in a jam, is to be stuck without a good option. In baseball, you might find yourself in a pickle when you try to steal a base pr get caught rounding a base on single up the middle but the outfielder makes a play where you are now in a rundown with the infielders. At work, you might find yourself in one when you bite of more than you can chew and have deadlines rapidly approaching. In the world of natural gas, it is the hard limits of the industries infrastructure that leads to problems. Take for example, at the end of the summer injection season, storage operators are running near full capacity given their rediness for the upcoming winter but there is still time for excess needing to find a home and without the ability to put it into the ground price move ... » read more | |