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| Tuesday Dec 10, 2024 | |
| The western region of Canada experienced its first cold spell of the winter season in the last days of November through early December, as the season made its presence felt. A significant cold snap brought much-below-normal temperatures to Western Canada. With La Niña conditions in place, this winter is expected to be cooler than average in the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada, setting the stage for a season of heightened cold and wintry weather across the region. Starting on November 20th, overnight low temperatures across most areas of Western Canada dropped into the single digits, with daytime highs reaching only the upper teens. In the final week of November, negative overnight low temperatures were observed for a couple of days. This past November, Alberta had largely ... » read more | |
| Monday Dec 9, 2024 | |
| Some stories are here one day and gone the next. An eclipse, a fire, a generation failure, our industry is full of exciting, one-time events. Other stories move more slowly and keep on giving. This is the case with CAISO’s intrastate transmissions. Late 2023 into early 2024 saw a big leap in CAISO’s solar and battery capacity. This has in turn upped the pressure on many of the grid’s weak points. In spring 2024, this development looked unprecedented and spectacular. But now with the year drawing to a close, transmission woes look not like a freak event but rather like a permanent fixture. Figure 1 | Marginal Cost of Congestion at SP15 and NP15 Our first picture shows CAISO’s reported marginal cost of congestion in SP15 and NP15. This highlights the driving ... » read more | |
| Friday Dec 6, 2024 | |
| For more than three years the Mid-Columbia has been the premium electricity market in the United States. What was once known as the low-cost, hydro-based wholesale market came roaring to life in 2021. The factors contributing to the bullish run at the Mid-Columbia were multi-fold – (1) load growth from data centers and industrial demand, (2) coal retirements, and (3) extremely limited resource additions. The supply-demand balance gradually tightened, and then suddenly, the region was short. We saw Mid-Columbia cash prices begin to move higher in May of 2021 and reaching a peak in January 2024 when daily ICE prices breached $1,000 per MWh during the MLK Weekend Winter Storm of 2024. Just as the bull market in the Northwest was getting legs, the state of Washington enacted a carbon ... » read more | |
| 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 | |