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| Tuesday Apr 8, 2025 | |
| Spring is in full swing, and in the energy sector, that signals the start of maintenance season. This is the time of year when power generators—after operating heavily through the winter—are taken offline for planned outages. These essential tune-ups help ensure the fleet is in top condition before summer, when demand surges again. Just as nature resets and prepares for growth during spring, the energy sector uses this period to recalibrate for the challenges ahead. Since March, we’ve been closely tracking outages across various ISOs, and things seem to be unfolding differently this year compared to past seasons. As markets continue to evolve across the U.S.—driven by factors like increasing load, growing renewable penetration, and a rising share of battery ... » read more | |
| Monday Apr 7, 2025 | |
| Power burns are a key component to the natural gas balancing conversation where in years past the common dialogue was around coal to natural gas-fired generation switching. Such conversations waned over the years as coal retirements were substantial, thus losing market share. Throw in the renewable transition where wind and solar interplayed with each other and disrupted the entire thermal fleet leaving more flexible resources readily available for the system operators, which did not bode well for the remaining coal plants that typically like to track load that is not in the form of net load. Net load takes the power demand profile and subtracts out wind and solar by region. Figure 1 | MISO Wind and Solar 12x24 Profiles The graph above displays the MISO wind and solar ... » read more | |
| Friday Apr 4, 2025 | |
| The California Resource Adequacy (RA) Program was started in 2004 and requires LSEs to maintain system, local, and flexible RA to ensure a reliable energy grid and to incentivize new resources for future grid reliability. The system RA capacity requirements for each LSE are based on a peak load plus PRM (e.g., 17%), the local RA requirements are based on local constraints determined with a 1-in-10 weather year an N-1-1 contingency, and the flexible RA is based on the largest three-hour ramp for each month. A 24-hour slice of day framework will be used in 2024 as a test year before fully adopting in 2025. The 24-hour slice RA framework is meant to ensure that system reliability (load plus planning reserve margin) would be met on the day of each month with the highest coincident ... » read more | |
| Thursday Apr 3, 2025 | |
| In the Pacific Northwest, activity on the hydro front has picked up significantly over the past week-and-a-half. Things kicked off with the heavy precipitation that showed up in the region last month after two months of relatively low moisture in January and February. As the rainy and snowy days piled up over the course of March, the seasonal water supply forecast ticked up steadily, leading into a rapid surge last week that culminated in a jump from 79.9 MAF (for Apr-Aug flows at The Dalles) on the 20th of March up to a high of 87.3 MAF on the 25th. Figure 1 | NWRFC Water Supply Forecast for Apr-Aug at The Dalles (MAF) The swing reset the expectations for hydro output in April, as the large jump in the water supply forecast led to an updated set of flood-risk ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Apr 2, 2025 | |
| The conditions for capturing real-time arbitrage were great last Monday for ERCOT batteries. The figure below is featured in our ERCOT Real-Time Dashboard and displays real-time net load, thermal generation and outages, as well as prices and heat rates for March 20th through 28th of this year. Our focus for this blog is Monday, March 24th. The net load profile, like most days depicted, had a midday dip from ERCOT’s solar generation. Net load in the evening, however, had a high and steep peak. Real-time prices across the different hubs were at or close to $0/MWh for several hours in the middle of the day. Real-time prices for the North hub are shown as an orange line while West prices are teal. Unlike most of the other days in the last week, evening prices shot over $150/MWh as net ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Apr 1, 2025 | |
| While solar growth and battery flexibility have dominated renewable energy discussions lately across the US, wind generation has quietly made some moves in PJM as discussed in our special report titled “Wind(ing) Road for PJM”. Though new capacity additions have slowed, Mother Nature has delivered a reminder of wind’s influence on grid dynamics. As this report explores, wind’s hourly generation profile is once again becoming a major player in grid operations, despite being less talked about in mainstream energy circles. Figure 1 | PJM Load and Renewable Supply Components – 12x24 Profiles Since early March, wind output across North America has surged to multi-year highs, especially in regions like PJM. Compared to 2023 and 2024, wind generation in 2025 has ... » read more | |
| Monday Mar 31, 2025 | |
| A recent survey of oil and natural gas executives gave us some interesting insight into the thoughts of industry leaders. The key word was uncertainty. Despite plenty of news pointing towards growth in the coming years, geopolitical instability, especially around trade and tariffs, seems to be weighing heavily on investment decisions. For example, while the new administration promises to use all levers available to boost Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) production, potential increases in the price of steel make said development much less tempting. Figure 1 | LNG Exports (MMCF/Day) As mentioned, LNG of the larger reversals in energy policy for this new administration (new development at a faster pace) whereas the previous sought top-down oversight on this growing industry. The chart above ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 28, 2025 | |
| ERCOT currently reports that they have a little over 10 GW of installed battery capacity, and one has only to glance at the supply stack to see that battery dispatch is becoming an increasingly visible component. The figure below shows ERCOT's reported monthly capacity by resource type for March 2025, alongside an example day's interval-level supply stack breakdown. Figure 1 | ERCOT Fuel Mix and Monthly Capacity The right-hand figure above provides an example of a fairly typical day (March 26th). Net load isn't shown here, but net load on the 26th had similar morning and evening peaks, with the evening just slightly lower than the morning. The timing of battery dispatch (dark red) aligns with the timing of the morning and evening peaks in net load. Figure 2 | 12x24 Average Net Load ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 27, 2025 | |
| The headline yesterday on the local news ticker read “Severe weather threat paired with record-breaking heat Wednesday”. The title is an encapsulation of some of the unusual and rapid changes taking place in the Pacific Northwest region that are having big impacts on Northwest hydro, both in the short-term as well as the outlook for the rest of the 2025 water year. Until this week, most of March has been on the cool side. When the precipitation started showing up after a dry end to the month of February, the region saw significant accumulations of snow throughout the region, including the low elevation sites in the Cascades. Figure 1 | West Side Daily Snow Water Equivalent (Inches) The figure above plots the daily snow water equivalent (SWE) ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 26, 2025 | |
| As we approach the end of March, outage season is in full swing as total US nuclear outages surpassed 18 GW on Monday. The amount offline has quickly climbed over the past two months. February began with only around 3.2 GW offline. That jumped to 11.4 GW at the beginning of this month. The figure below shows the 2025 outages in yellow along with our forecast in dark blue. The 2024 outage line is green while the 2023 line is teal. Note that our forecast includes only plants 100% offline for refueling and estimated dates for current unplanned outages. Refueling refers to the scheduled maintenance that each plant completes in 18 or 24- month cycles. These always align with shoulder seasons, either the spring or fall, when demand tends to be lower and grids can afford to lose baseload nuclear ... » read more | |