Featured Articles
| 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 | |
| Thursday Feb 22, 2018 | |
| Over the course of this year, 14.1 GWs of coal capacity is slated to retire. While in an ideal world carbon-free renewables would replace the coal facilities, gas generation will need to compensate for a large portion of the retirements. ERCOT and PJM contain nearly two thirds of the retirements for the lower 48 in the coming year, but fundamental factors affecting power ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Feb 21, 2018 | |
| If you have been following the EnergyGPS newsletter topics over the years, the one thing you can count on is there's always something going on within the state of California. Back in 2012, we saw a couple of nuclear units forced into retirement (SONGS) as the replacement rods were deemed bad within a few months of returning to service. After a summer ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Feb 20, 2018 | |
| It was one week ago that WSI led the meteorology pack by reversing a warm trend to much colder solution to begin the month of March. After the publication, the March contract rallied by 8 cents to $2.64 on fears that another polar event was expected to drop down on the Lower 48. Since that publication the near term weather events have posted nothing but warmth. Over the ... » read more | |