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| Friday Dec 11, 2020 | |
| One of my uncles is the resident holiday Grinch for my extended family. Each year as fall turns to winter he will be heard to loudly complain that the decorations are going up to too early in the stores and on people’s houses. Lights and trees and the like, he strongly maintains, are not appropriate until at least the first of December—and December 15th would be better. I and the rest of my family largely ignore his tirades. Imagine my surprise, when I learned that tinsel and lights had been sighted at his house the year mere days after Thanksgiving! He may not be the only one to have gotten a jump-start on their holiday festivities. The Washington Post, among other news outlets have suggested that weariness from a year filled with worries about ... » read more | |
| Thursday Dec 10, 2020 | |
| Since the start of December 2020, the Natural Gas Futures curve has shifted down with the Prompt Month leading the way as it has gone from $2.88 down to the $2.40 mark only to bounce back the last couple of days to currently sit at $2.45. Most of this change was driven by the above normal temperatures throughout the month of November, especially given that the two previous starts to winter have been quite chilly. During the first week of the new month, the 1-15 day weather models were showing a quick winter snowfall in the Northeast only to give way to above normal temperatures. All the local weather channels throughout the Midwest were calling for a not-so white holiday season while the South Central was going to be swinging in/out of chilly weather to above normal and ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Dec 9, 2020 | |
| If you have been active in the electricity market with a focus on the West, California tends to come to the forefront of the conversation as there is always something happening worth talking about. The history is endless but we will pick it up at the time I started my career in the space (late 1990's). All eyes were on the California legislation and utility commissions as deregulation was in the works and ready to make a splash in April 1998. The drastic change in how the utilities operated was deemed an instant success only to be take a drastic turn due to the construct of the rules and policies which include freezing the retail rates for customers, not allowing the utilities themselves to place bilateral long term hedges and real-time price caps not aligned to ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Dec 8, 2020 | |
| The story line during the early part of this winter has been the persistent above normal weather the hemisphere has experienced. It has been over a year since the continent has seen a major below normal event. The lack of heating load during the month of November has kept the EIA storage inventory close to 4 BCF. In order to work off the supply abundance the market has sold off the Q1 NYMEX futures almost $1.00 in the past two weeks. The 30% move in the NYMEX pricing has started to lift heat rates as more gas generation gains merit in the electric grid dispatch. Figure 1 | CAISO SP15, PJM and SPP Heat Rates for Q1 2021 Since the first of December power burns across the Lower 48 have moved from 23 to 32 BCF per day. Part of that is the recovery of power demand for ... » read more | |
| Monday Dec 7, 2020 | |
| In last weeks special report, 'CAISO Value Stacking 101', we delved into the delicate balancing act that a grid scale battery needs to perform in order to maximize its revenue while providing multiple services with unique requirements. In order to move energy from low priced hours to high priced hours (energy arbitrage), you need to utilize both your battery’s inverter capacity (MW) and its storage capacity (MWh) to make that happen. However, both of these assets are also required in order to provide regulation services. For example, when a battery clears the energy market at its bid price, the range of deviations it can make from its awarded energy activity will change. As the battery charges, it will be able to provide more upwards regulation (RegUp) because it can stop charging ... » read more | |
| Friday Dec 4, 2020 | |
| EGPS has been developing and refining a model for solar plus storage assets for the last few years. We’ve developed an elegant model that uses a single day-ahead, hourly price curve to value the solar and provide a baseline for the storage asset. Then the storage asset receives additional value stemming from the real-time price arbitrage and ancillary service sales. The day-ahead hourly prices form the key nexus between solar and storage assets plus the day-ahead prices represent important storage hedging opportunities in the wholesale markets. In this blog, we focus on the important differences between day ahead and real time prices, where as our featured special report for the week will detail the foundations of this modeling approach. To access the special report, you ... » read more | |
| Thursday Dec 3, 2020 | |
| Here in Portland, one of the traditions for the holiday season is the Technical Management Team (TMT) year-end review. Here the individuals in the inter-agency group responsible for making recommendations for dam and reservoir operations in the Columbia River Basin hydro system come together to discuss the past year’s operations, evaluate what went well (and what did not), and look forward to the new water year. This year’s meeting took place yesterday, and provided plenty of things to think about and discuss over the coming weeks and months. Here are a few highlights. One of the main topics up for discussion at this year’s meeting was spill. For the 2020 water year several changes were made to spill operations by hydro projects in the PNW ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Dec 2, 2020 | |
| If you have ever been to Buckingham Palace in England and stayed around long enough you would have seen what is known as the 'changing of the guards' . It is a ceremony where soldiers are guarding the residence and administrative headquarters of the monarch of the United Kingdom. At certain times throughout the day, the observation of the current guards being replaced by a new shift is a tradition like no other. Figure 1 | Changing of the Guard In the energy sector, the 'changing of the guard' can take on several different means depending on the commodity itself. In today's blog we will look at how the weather fits with this slogan along with wind generation in ERCOT. Starting with the weather, the seasonality around the summer and winter strip ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Dec 1, 2020 | |
| Using broad strokes the climate over North America has been above normal throughout the entire year with only brief glimpses of what it is like to have a below normal event. We are seeing a minor instance this week. Since the Thanksgiving holiday average temperatures have dropped by as much as 20 degrees throughout most of the Southeast, Gulf and Midwest. This is not polar in origin so the departures are only slightly below climatology. It is the first real taste of winter weather. Snow has also accumulated across the Ohio Valley. Figure 1 | WSI Temperature Map for December 1 Driven by the cool weather the ResCom demand across the country is moving up from 27 to 38 BCF per day. That is a very large increase but still keeps the Lower 48 heating load below ... » read more | |
| Monday Nov 30, 2020 | |
| While reviewing ancillary service prices in California in connection with some battery valuation work this week, I stumbled upon something odd. Here is a scatterplot of the clearing price for regulation up and regulation down ancillary services in CAISO, with each dot representing a single hour: Figure 1 – CAISO system-wide regulation clearing prices, 2019, hourly There may be something interesting to say about the relationship between the RegUp and RegDown prices, but what caught my eye is the unusual distribution of data points. There are no grid lines in the chart above, the vertical and horizontal lines are just formed by the density of observations along those pricing points. Scatter plots tend to form clouds, not grids. Since I just finished ordering supplies for a garden ... » read more | |