Featured Articles
| Friday Jun 9, 2017 | |
| Power markets are curious beasts. They really are!! Electricity is a vital commodity with no substitutes (at least in the short term) and limited ability to store. Furthermore, for most consumers reading this newsletter, electricity is quite a bargain compared to the benefit consumers derive from the product. At least for me, you could increase the price of electricity by ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jun 8, 2017 | |
| The loss of the Aliso Canyon storage facility in the SoCal Gas system continues to plague California. The cavern was shut down in February of 2016 after a massive leak of natural gas was plugged. It took almost a year for residents evacuated from the area to return to their homes. Prior to the leak, the storage caverns were a ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jun 7, 2017 | |
| On May 31st Brayton Point coal shut its doors for good pulling 1,600 MWs of capacity out of the market. The unit was the last coal plant in Massachusetts and the largest non-NG fired generator in ISONE. Figure 1 | Brayton Point Coal Plant ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jun 6, 2017 | |
| As we enter the month of June, the hydro system in the Pacific Northwest usually sees its generation shift down as the storage facilities are in full refill mode. This year is looking to be an outlier when you compare it to the past two years as the generation output continue to be strong with no sight of the foot coming off the gas pedal. » read more | |
| Monday Jun 5, 2017 | |
| The day after the June Nymex contract rolled off the board, the July contract moved up roughly $0.07 to settle $3.31. This move up was on a 11-15 day forecast that was showing above normal temperatures across the Midwest and Eastern portion of the country. In fact, this was right around the time the CFTC Commitment of Traders was at its all-time high for the large ... » read more | |
| Friday Jun 2, 2017 | |
| This week the CAISO officially announced the addition of two new energy imbalance market (EIM) participants – Powerex and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP). These two announcements are a big deal. While Pacificorp receives full credit as the first-mover in the EIM, the addition of Powerex and LADWP takes the EIM to a whole new level. The devil is in ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jun 1, 2017 | |
| We have been writing about the water year in the Pacific Northwest for some time. The major theme was tied to the Snake River basin getting plenty of snow early while the Above Grand Coulee basin lagged. That was until February when the precipitation pattern dumped a tremendous amount of snow in Upper Washington, parts of Montana and British Columbia. This ... » read more | |
| Wednesday May 31, 2017 | |
| Through the majority of this spring the grid was tormented by unusually large amount of nuclear outages. The total amount of generation offline peaked at a little more than 25 GWs for the end of April which marked the highest outage total since 2013. Through the back half of May we have seen a rush of units return to the grid as nearly 10 GWs of ... » read more | |
| Tuesday May 30, 2017 | |
| Weeks ago we made note of the increased polarization of the different reporting sectors in the natural gas market as depicted by the Commodity Futures trading Commission (CFTC) weekly report. Prior to this past week, we saw a series of increases in the Money Managers position taking it to multi year highs and by far the largest position outside of the Swap Dealers. The Money ... » read more | |
| Friday May 26, 2017 | |
| On Wednesday of this week, I spoke at a Northwest Power Market conference here in Portland, where the theme was just that "Northwest Power Markets: Mapping the Road Ahead". My panel was the first to go, where the theme was 'Drivers of Change'. As we all know, the topic of conversation these days is not about what is going on in the Pacific Northwest ... » read more | |
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