Menu
Featured Articles
| Friday May 30, 2025 | |
| By Emily Johnson My now-husband and I married two weeks ago, and as a honeymoon trip we rented a cabin designed in the style of a lookout tower over by the Bend, Oregon. From the lookout, we could see a dozen different peaks, and if you walked out just a little further, there was a great view of the Deschutes River. Figure 1 | Panoramic View from the Lookout As one typically does when they go on vacation, we started imagining what it would be like to live in a place this remote. The view would be fantastic, we’d have great access to any kind of outdoor activity we’d possibly want, no road noise, great air quality, with sage as an olfactory backdrop. However, we quickly fleshed out the numerous downsides. This was a little island of habitability in an expanse of desert, which ... » read more | |
| Thursday May 29, 2025 | |
| After peaking at 14.6 GW back on the 9th of May (for the HL average), hydro generation has been on a downward path for much of the month. But now, with just a few days left until the start of June, things have turned the corner with a few different changes in conditions and hydro operations driving production higher. HL hydro generation bottomed out over the Memorial Day weekend below 9.5 GW this past Sunday but stepped up big starting Tuesday with output rising to 12.6 GW. Figure 1 | PNW Hydro Daily Average Generation (MW) This was both welcome and needed given the demand environment in the Pacific Northwest, with temperatures rising to 85 degrees yesterday and 93 degrees in Boise, and with additional increases on the way Friday. Load numbers have risen while ... » read more | |
| Wednesday May 28, 2025 | |
| The unofficial start of summer is here with Memorial Day now in the rearview. Heat is starting to build in the forecast for parts of Canada and the US. You can check out our latest market flashes for the warmth coming in the Northeast and the heat already hitting Alberta. With the extra heat comes extra demand, but some baseload nuclear remains offline despite the unofficial changing of the season. The figure below shows the total nuclear outages across the US in megawatts and the profile for this year stands out in its strength at the end of this month. Usually, the back half of May has a steep drop in nuclear outages as plants return from regular refueling, but last week saw a surge of unplanned outages which brought total levels back over 14 GW. Figure 1 | Total Nuclear Plant ... » read more | |
| Tuesday May 27, 2025 | |
| During the month of May, natural gas production has remained robust, with Nova Receipts mostly hovering above 14.5 Bcf/d in the second half of the month. As a result, the natural gas market has seen a high volume of molecules in the system. With demand remaining modest, injection rates have been strong. As discussed previously, the combination of a mild winter and sustained high production in the prior year has led to storage caverns being ahead of schedule for the second consecutive year. The graph below illustrates storage levels in Alberta since 2021. The year 2021 is shown in red, 2022 in green, 2023 in orange, 2024 in blue, and the current year in purple. Figure 1| Alberta’s storage level, 2021-Present The previous withdrawal season, in 2024, closed with 301.25 Bcf in ... » read more | |
| Friday May 23, 2025 | |
| How Many Orange M&M's Are in the Jar? ERCOT is the most exciting electricity market in North America. Winter prices spike about once a decade – for example 2011 and Winter Storm Uri in 2021. People are always expecting price spikes in the summer. We saw that in a big way in 2023. And there is also the occasional spike during the shoulder months when outages are high. At Energy GPS we think about the ERCOT market as like the old statistics problem of drawing balls from an urn – or in this blog, M&M’s from a jar. Each color of M&M represents a different price level. In this jar, white may represent over-supply conditions with low or negative price, blue may represent prices set by efficient natural gas plants, and red may represent prices set by more expensive ... » read more | |
| Thursday May 22, 2025 | |
| ERCOT saw its day-ahead price shift up to triple digits on Tuesday (20th) as the evening ramp jumped to levels north of $550 and held there for two hours (HE20-21). The bookend hours were impressive as well given they sat around the $190 mark. The image below illustrates the shape tied to the Houston trading hub where the blue bar displays the premium discussed above. The reference lines that are shaded gold and red respectively represent the prior day (19th) and a week ago (13th). There was a pinch point in the supply stack that escalated the day-ahead marginal cost. Figure 1 | ERCOT Houston Hourly Day-Ahead Price Settle for May 20th, 2025 The reason was clear looking at the forecast as the power demand was modest while the renewable sector was looking at wind ... » read more | |
| Wednesday May 21, 2025 | |
| It’s that time of the month again when notices are being sent left and right as natural gas pipelines announce maintenance for the upcoming month. Pipelines in the West are no exception as multiple pipelines in the Pacific Northwest and California have updated their maintenance schedules for June in the last week. The figure below is featured in West NG Pipeline Capacity dashboard and shows current flows and the available capacity for different points on El Paso Natural Gas pipeline. The green lines for June show the updated changes based on EPNG’s June maintenance report that was sent out earlier this week. One of the most notable changes is for L2000 which hasn’t had any available capacity since early April. June’s posting extends this work through at least the ... » read more | |
| Tuesday May 20, 2025 | |
| During this month of May, the South Central region experienced a series of above-normal temperature days, especially from May 14 to 16, which put pressure on the grid. In our latest special report titled “On the 4th Day”, we discussed the market trends seen in the past week in greater detail. During this period, all eyes were on the net load profiles, focusing on the net load plus outages metric, which give a clearer view of where the marginal megawatt lies in the natural gas supply stack. A useful tool in this analysis is the ERCOT Real-Time Dashboard, which tracks the thermal plus outage volume and offers a detailed breakdown of the grid’s conditions during different periods of the day. These conditions were key to understanding when the grid was stressed, especially ... » read more | |
| Monday May 19, 2025 | |
| California is known for its snow-capped mountains, striped with snow fed streams filled with fat trout. It is also known for its hot, dry summers. The high peaks make California very well suited for hydro generation. However, the lack of precipitation in the most energy-hungry stretch of the year makes for a tricky problem. Let us check in on how this puzzle is playing out, as the summer season fast approaches. Figure 1 | California Snow Water Equivalent Figure 1 shows California’s snow water equivalent, which measures how much water is stored as snow across the state. This is a key measure to understand the strength or weakness of hydro in the spring and subsequent summer seasons. In red, we see the current year, gold and red show the previous two, and yellow and black show ... » read more | |
| Friday May 16, 2025 | |
| This past Wednesday, NERC released their annual Summer Reliability Assessment (SRA). In this report, they look at each Regional Entity in North America (most of which are further broken down into multiple assessment areas) and evaluate each region's ability to meet its expected peak demand during the months of June – September. Figure 1 | NERC Regional Entities (Source: NERC) The full document is well worth reading, but below are a few key findings: Assuming normal conditions with respect to factors such as generator forced outages, all regions are expected to be able to meet their peak demand this summer. However, several regions have "elevated risk", meaning that it's statistically plausible that a combination of factors—say, unexpected forced outages on top of ... » read more | |