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| Thursday Dec 5, 2024 | |
| As frequent readers will be aware, the content we publish as part of our eCommerce product offerings, including regular articles, special reports, and monthly reports cast a wide net, touching upon the hot issues and news in markets across the country and focusing on everything in gas and power with a special focus on renewables. This week we have turned the spotlight onto CAISO with our latest Monthly Write-up, “Thanksgiving Turducken” as well as our most recent Special Report, “Time Flies when…” touching upon the growth in CAISO solar (both utility scaled and behind-the-meter) as well as battery storage and its impacts on the grid. The former The duck curve formed in California early in the push for 100% renewables in the coming decade as ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Dec 4, 2024 | |
| Just a few days ago, the calendar page flipped to the last month in 2024. This means there is new content available at EnergyGPS as the first of the month marks the publication of new monthly dashboards. If you’re subscribed to our Platinum Plus package, you have access to two new battery dashboards for ERCOT and CAISO. The monthly battery reports contain insight into long-term trends and comparisons of prices, arbitrage opportunities, and more for regions in California and Texas. The figure below offers a taste of what you’ll see with average monthly ancillary prices for ERCOT going back to 2023. Our Platinum Plus subscribers also received a new battery report offering even more detailed analysis of an ongoing trend for the ERCOT battery fleet. Read on for a sneak peek of ... » read more | |
| Monday Dec 2, 2024 | |
| Despite the holiday, energy and gas markets did not disappear over the weekend, although they did look a bit sluggish. Now, on Monday morning, we were curious just how reliable the holiday downturn in demand is. Put another way, with nothing but market data to go off of, could someone reliably guess the date of a moving holiday like Thanksgiving? Figure 1 | CAISO Load Forecast Actuals and Historicals Our first chart approaches the problem from the side of power markets. Pictured here is CAISO’s load and load forecasts. We can see here that the 23rd and 24th had a normal weekend drop in demand. Count forward from there and you have a suspicious Thursday drop in demand, which would put this year’s Thanksgiving on the 28th. The grey dotted line shows demand values from ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Nov 27, 2024 | |
| Winter weather descended on Alberta last week. Overnight lows dropped to the single digits and then below 0 degrees. Negative temperatures are expected to continue through this week. The figure below features our 15-day heating degree day matrix with the date of the forecast on the y-axis and the date the forecast was posted on the x-axis. The blue indicating higher HDDs has been percolating for quite some time and gradually turned more extreme (moving left to right) as the forecast dates approached. In this blog, we’ll check in on how Alberta fared with the early-season chill. Figure 1 | Alberta 15-Day Heating Degree Day Matrix Although we’ve recently written about the increase in pool price hitting the $1000/MWh cap (see ‘Looking Ahead in Alberta’), AESO has ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Nov 26, 2024 | |
| As the Lower 48 moves from autumn to winter, certain regions have experienced more dramatic seasonal changes while others have experienced a slow transition. The Pacific Northwest has seen cooler, wetter weather, while other areas, such as the South Central and Northeast, have had warmer-than-usual conditions this November. In particular, Texas has been notably warmer in October and November, impacting the state’s power grid in significant ways. Mother Nature delivered warmer temperatures across the ERCOT region as displayed in Figure 1, with the top pane showing daily cooling degree days (CDDs) from back in September through November with orange indicating above-normal temperatures and blue the opposite. In the bottom pane we have the difference from normal CDDs with the same color ... » read more | |
| Monday Nov 25, 2024 | |
| How do you know when winter has started? Here in Portland, you know its winter when people celebrate every day without rain like it’s a national holiday. In the New England it’s when they switch from pants (because they‘re afraid of ticks) to short (to show they’re not afraid of the cold). In the world of natural gas, winter as arrived when ResCom demand starts to rise. In this blog we look at what that winter ResCom transition looks like in different parts of North America. Knowing cold weather increases natural gas demandm how the story plays out looks a little different in each region. Figure 1 | Alberta Weekday ResCom Demand (BCF/d) vs Temperature (F) The above chart shows the relationship between average daily temperature and ResCom demand. Each circle ... » read more | |
| Friday Nov 22, 2024 | |
| My son’s Halloween Trick or Treat haul last month was a lot like solar in CAISO this past year. He brought back such an enormously filled bag, that its consumption needed to be significantly curtailed. My wife, as is her early-November custom, hid the bag after letting him gorge for a couple days. Really though, I don’t think she was hiding it from just him. She won’t tell me where she put it either, and if she had, I’d go grab a Twix right now and take a photo of the stash for this blog. She’ll bust it out when my son’s friends come over, but until then, he and I spend our spare moments sheepishly poking through drawers and backs of closets. So instead of showing you a big sack of candy ... » read more | |
| Thursday Nov 21, 2024 | |
| The Pacific Northwest is certainly no stranger to rain, but the storms that raged in Western Washington earlier this week on Tuesday were unusually potent. The atmospheric river weather system that has been on the radar for the PNW and northern California arrived with a bang, transforming into a bomb cyclone Tuesday with winds and heavy rain that dropped power lines, produced flooding, and left more than half a million without power Tuesday night. The excitement is not yet over and the precipitation is set to move eastward, inland across the Cascades to deliver its payload in eastern Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. This can be seen in the figure below, which shows a snapshot of the 5-day and 10-day precipitation forecasts published by the Northwest River Forecast Center ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Nov 20, 2024 | |
| Over the past few years, Alberta has been pushed to the extremes, hitting both its price floor and price cap more frequently. The figure below displays the number of hours spent at the $0/MWh price floor and the $1000/MWh price cap for each year since 2018. Data for 2024 goes through the first fourteen days of November. The number of hours at $0/MWh hit an inflection point in 2024. While 2020 and 2023 both had between 40 and 50 hours at the floor (other years displayed had less than 15), 315 hours have been at $0/MWh in 2024 so far. Moving to the price cap, the number of hours increased from 4 hours in 2018 to 26 hours so far in 2024. Every year since 2021 has had more than 10 hours at the cap while every year since 2022 has had more than 15. The data is separated into hourly groups of ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Nov 19, 2024 | |
| As we move through the back half of November, the transition from fall to winter is becoming increasingly apparent in some regions, though it remains delayed in others. In the Pacific Northwest, the shorter days, cooler temperatures, and persistent rain clearly signal the seasonal shift. However, this transition has been less pronounced in areas such as the Northeast, South Central, and parts of the Midwest, where moderate to warmer-than-normal temperatures experienced in the first half of November have postponed the onset of winter conditions. While some regions are firmly embracing the chill of the season, others are experiencing a slower progression, with fall’s warmth lingering longer than usual. Since last month, Mother Nature has delivered mostly moderate weather conditions ... » read more | |