Featured Articles
| 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 | |
| Friday Feb 16, 2018 | |
| Can we talk batteries today? Everywhere I turn people are talking about batteries. The Wall Street Journal published two articles about batteries this week. As I’ve traveled to conferences and to visit clients in the last month I hear that within the next couple of years, every new solar project will be paired with batteries behind the inverter. In my travels ... » read more | |
| Thursday Feb 15, 2018 | |
| Warm weather has settled in over the Northeast. The citizens of Boston must be taking their puffy winter jackets off the coat rack and storing them in the closet as the city warmed up from 28 degrees on Tuesday to over 40 degrees for today. As the heat rolls in, we have seen the prices for Algonquin pull back, dropping below $3 for the day. Moving forward, these cool ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Feb 14, 2018 | |
| After a cold and volatile January, conditions have leveled off across the Northeast as temperatures have moved above normal this week. The correlated decrease in res/com demand has freed up pipeline capacity from Dominion up through the Algonquin systems. After a one day cold event on Tuesday, gas prices have settled to their lowest values of the year as the M3/Dom ... » read more | |