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| Monday Mar 20, 2017 | |
| The winter in the Pacific Northwest has been anything but normal. A friend of mine said he heard, "if you are 32 years old or younger and have lived in Portland your whole like, this winter is the coldest you have ever experienced". If you recall, the month of February was the wettest on record along with the average temperatures coming in 4-5 degrees below normal. The colder jet stream from the Pacific Northwest northern region collided with the Pacific jet stream that pushed up from California and dumped plenty of snow along the I-84 ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 17, 2017 | |
| Well folks … it looks like we have two NCAA tournament newsletters in a row. Yesterday’s was written by Midwest Jeff. Today’s written by Northeast Tim. You can probably imagine how pre-occupied our office is this week, between filling out brackets, tracking games, and talking trash. I come from New York State, Upstate New York. New York used to be a state that enjoyed a proud basketball tradition. Some of the greatest college basketball players of all time hail from New York – Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Pearl Washington, Chris Mullen, Julius Erving ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 16, 2017 | |
| With the NCAA basketball tournament getting ready to start all I can think about is the Wisconsin Badgers making a run or the Minnesota Golden Gophers rising to the occasion as it is their first appearance with Richard Pitino as their head coach (son of Louisville's head coach Rick Pitino). These are my loyalties along with the sleeper pick of the University of North Dakota as my father has told me so much about this team as he follows every team that is from his hometown state. Each and every team has the same goals of reaching the Final Four and actually ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 15, 2017 | |
| Looking at the nuclear outage schedule heading into this spring one area in particular stands out to us as ISONE is expecting 3 if their 4 units to come down sometime during April. Seabrook (1,159 MWs) is expected to come offline on April 1st followed by Millstone 2 (882 MWs) and Pilgrim (685 MWs) on the 9th. If we weight the capacity by the number of days offline April is expected to average 2,256 MWa worth of nuclear refueling outages on a daily basis. Figure 1 | ISONE Nuclear Outage Schedule NY is also expected to see some outages this ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 14, 2017 | |
| It has been a long road to recovery for the natural gas production industry. A warm winter last year led to a swelled storage complex pushing natural gas prices down below shut in economics for many areas of the country. The result was a tightening of balance sheets for many producers. Production volumes fell with the capital expenditures. After some industry consolidation and a robust price recovery, we are starting to see a more positive view for the producer community. Prices have largely recovered and the prospect of additional market opportunities from ... » read more | |
| Monday Mar 13, 2017 | |
| As we get into the middle of March, the winter strip is coming to an end when it comes to the cash trading of the days, but Mother Nature is not through with winter quite yet as a cold ridge has set up over the Midwest and eastern portion of the United States. This has left the grid quite a bit tighter as the rescom demand has shifted up from 25-27 BCF/d to 45-47 BCF/d. Ultimately, this has pushed the daily storage withdrawals back up to 25 BCF/d. Figure 1 | Net Daily Storage As you can see in the graph above, after spending several weeks trending to ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 10, 2017 | |
| There is no lack of innovation in California. It is one of the state’s core competencies. Whether technology, environmental regulations, renewable energy, movies, or entertainment the Golden State leads the way. An innovation in the electricity market that has been steadily gaining steam over the last few years is the development of Community Choice Aggregators or CCA’s. CCA’s are governmental entities formed by cities and counties to procure electricity for their residents, businesses, and municipal facilities. Think about a competitive ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 9, 2017 | |
| Our daily newsletter has covered what has been happening at Orville Dam since the spillway started to give way as the lake behind the dam reached emergency spillway levels in the middle of February. This event call for over 200,000 people living in the surrounding neighborhoods to be evacuated for safety reason. A couple of days later, the residents were able to return to their homes while the riverbed below the spillway/dam was filled with large pieces of concrete as well as boulders/soot from the hillside being washed into it. Such debris caused the ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 8, 2017 | |
| With the renewable push over the years, the Lower 48 has seen quite a bit of wind and solar hit the grid. The pioneer to all of this was the State of California where they implemented a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) that paved the way for wind generation to be built both in the Pacific Northwest and in-state during the early years. Recently, the renewable of choice has come in the form of solar facilities that have recently peaked over 9 GW during the middle of the day. Looking at the midday average we are seeing over 8.1 GW hit the grid during ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 7, 2017 | |
| There were some big changes to the weekend weather models that caused us to alter our natural gas demand forecast. Starting on the Saturday model runs, a subtropical ridge built over the Desert Southwest allowing cold air from Canada to drop into the Midwest. By day 8 of the forecast it is now expected to be over the Mid Atlantic and New England. Chicago is expected to see a drop in its daytime highs from the mid 60's down to the low 30's. This change in the flow pattern took a prevailing forecast that had been trending above normal for most of the winter and pushed ... » read more | |
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