Featured Articles
| Thursday Mar 8, 2018 | |
| SPP saw a surge of wind throughout the last weekend, serving over 50% of the region's load for nearly the entire time. While there were some curtailments along the way, these were much lower than we would have expected when compared to the fall of 2017. This time around SPP was better able to handle the massive increases in wind. » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 7, 2018 | |
| While the worst is likely behind us, winter is far from over from a power market perspective. March can mean something different each year depending on just how long winter wants to hang around. Sometimes it is a joyful transition into spring full flowers and some much needed sunshine. Other years it is a miserable extension of winter that makes you ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 6, 2018 | |
| This has been a wild ride for Alberta gas balancing over the past year. Last spring, NGTL started a large upgrade and maintenance project on ther system. This severely constricted network transport cutting back on the ability to get production volumes out of the province. At the same time, the same maintenance restricted access to some of the storage fields on the system. » read more | |
| Monday Mar 5, 2018 | |
| This past week the drought stricken Southern California finally received some rainfall. Many inches of the wet stuff hit Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Los Angeles. One of the bi-products of rain in regions with a large installed base of rooftop solar, is increased load during the hours in which the sun would normally shine. The reason of course is ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 2, 2018 | |
| Price curves are estimates of the future value of a particular commodity, at a particular delivery point, at a specific point in time in the future. For example, the “NYMEX natural gas curve” represents the price of natural gas delivered to the Henry Hub in a specific month in the future. In electricity markets, forward curves typically represent the price of ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 1, 2018 | |
| Last week we looked at coal retirements across both PJM and ERCOT, this week we will compare wind generation with coal retirements in MISO. While MISO has continued to build wind capacity over the course of 2017, it will see several coal units retire over the upcoming year, much like ERCOT. The incremental wind capacity will be able to offset part of the increase in power ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Feb 28, 2018 | |
| As we entered February we sent out a Newsletter titled "Tied to Ties" which discussed a line outage on the NY and New England AC interface. The outage was limiting flows between NY and New England to just 600 MWa which is around half of the total capacity. While 600 MWa may not seem like an overtly large derate, the grid ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Feb 27, 2018 | |
| Quarterly earnings reports from the oil and gas community always provide great data points for reconciling forward looking natural gas production estimates. Late Friday, Cabot Oil and Gas published the slides from their Q4 earnings release. The most important information from the presentation was the volume estimates they published. » read more | |
| Monday Feb 26, 2018 | |
| As I am sure many of you are aware the MidC is a very volatile trading hub. The biggest driver of the MidC's volatility on a seasonal basis is the Pacific Northwest's heavy dependence on hydro generation. If you look at Figure 1 you will see that the region's hydro generation can vary from 20 GWs, which is where we currently sit due to a wet January coupled with ... » read more | |
| Friday Feb 23, 2018 | |
| The Donald is at it again. When the marketplace doesn’t produce result that he likes, he puts his hand on the economic scales to get the change that he wants to see. Last summer he tried to toss a life ring to certain Midwest coal and nuclear plants by asking FERC to consider implementing new RTO rules that favored power generating assets that had a physical stockpile ... » read more | |