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| Friday Aug 27, 2021 | |
| By Tim Belden A few weeks back I wrote about the signs of a bull market in natural gas and electricity – or at least perhaps the end of what has been a 5+ year systemic bear market in North American electricity and natural gas commodities. The energy-related bull markets are everywhere. The labor market for experienced energy personnel is red hot. Just ask anyone looking for a job or trying to hire someone. I know of a person with 15 years of experience in the biz who is not actively looking for a job who keeps receiving unsolicited, inbound inquiries. He waits. The inquiries keep coming and getting increasingly rich. When people started dangling 150% of his current comp package things start to look interesting. Companies in the “energy transitions” niche are in the ... » read more | |
| Thursday Aug 26, 2021 | |
| The Deep Freeze that hit Texas in February created shockwaves that are still being felt today, and likely will continue to be into the future. The extreme (by Texas standards) cold created a cornucopia of factors - each potentially debilitating on their own - that crashed the grid. Nearly 4.5 million customers lost power and heat, a situation that proved fatal. Those that remained online ended up paying prices that obliterated previous record highs. In our Energy GPS ERCOT subscription package we issue market alerts during timely market events. Typically these amount to 2 or 3 per week; during the Deep Freeze, we were putting out 2-3 per day as market conditions were evolving so rapidly, with each movement featuring massive moves. A decent portion of the ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Aug 25, 2021 | |
| Over the past several months, the West Power market has been at the forefront of many conversations as it was just over a year ago when California was in the mist of rolling energy blackouts for a two-day period and the Desert Southwest was dealing with plus 120 degree daytime highs for multiple days in a row. The Pacific Northwest sat back and basically watched as both of its counterparts were reeling. Some of the comfort came from the simple fact that there was transmission capacity de-rateshappening and a power load profile that was being impacted by the pandemic along with moderate temperatures. The biggest contributing factor to the comfort of the Pacific Northwest market participants was the simple fact that the 2020 Water Year was such that the late coolness kept the ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Aug 24, 2021 | |
| Dominion Transmission, which is now called Berkshire Hathaway Energy, is the regional utility for Western Pennsylvania. It is also the native utility for the major producing area of the Marcellus shale basin. Since the start of the production boon more than a decade ago, the receipts on the system have overwhelmed the demand and export capabilities often leading to full storage conditions at the end of the refill season in September and October. This was an annual problem because it also timed with fall maintenance work. These two conditions bound up the ability to handle the surging production volumes sometimes leading to producer shut-ins. It has happened so often that the basis futures have built in a large discount on the curve as if this was as regular as the sun rising in the ... » read more | |
| Monday Aug 23, 2021 | |
| California continues to be in the spotlight as the 2021 summer months were touted as one for the ages given the grid saw rolling blackouts a year prior and the request for more capacity needed came at the end of June as summer was fast approaching. Since that time, the California system operator (CAISO) has been able to keep the overall auction clears substantially low compared to that of their neighbors to the north and east. It should be noted, with moderate temperatures in all three regions as of late, neither the Midc nor Palo Verde has been able to get off the ground either as the former has plenty of hydro and wind hitting the grid while the latter is hedged near the peak of a load profile that was anticipating the daytime highs in Phoenix and surrounding areas topping ... » read more | |
| Friday Aug 20, 2021 | |
| Last week we wrote about the high but stagnant CAISO prices and their implications for battery operations. This was coming off the tail end of a few pretty eventful weeks in the region—high temperatures meant high loads, thermal units running around the clock, and gas prices which for most of the summer have been trending above last year by a wide margin. The graph below shows SoCal Citygate gas pricing from June through August for 2020 (yellow line) and 2021 (blue line). Figure 1: SoCal Citygate gas prices for June-August 2020 and 2021. Heading into this week, there were a lot of factors working against balancing the CAISO grid. It started with a constraint on the transmission line between southern California and Palo Verde, where the CAISO tends to import power on a daily ... » read more | |
| Thursday Aug 19, 2021 | |
| Texas has seen more precipitation this past week as we reached the middle of the third quarter. Such weather has been a common trend most of the summer along the Gulf Coast region of the state while the other areas of the Lone Star state have dealt with consecutive high wind days met with a couple of days where the hourly profiles pulled back. Solar continues to be the biggest delta change year on year as the middle of the day has roughly 6 GW hitting the system compared to roughly half of that last year. Figure 1 | ERCOT Monthly Wind/Solar Profiles - Hourly The figure above is one that is present in the ERCOT Real-Time Dashboard that details what is going on within the ERCOT footprint on a daily basis in the real-time setting. The top two panes represent the monthly hourly ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Aug 18, 2021 | |
| LNG forward spreads continue widening, recently drawing strength from Europe’s lethargic storage refill rate taking another punch to the chin. Last week we published a Flash to our LNG subscribers describing how Russia’s Gazprom has had to withdraw volumes from its Ukrainian storage inventories in order to meet its delivery obligations to the EU. A fire at a Gazprom processing facility in Russia in late July cut Gazprom’s ability to deliver gas to the EU via its Yamal pipeline, forcing Gazprom to turn to storage gas in the middle of summer. Figure 1 shows Ukrainian gas storage inventories, which we track and chart on a daily basis along with northern European, southern European, and U.K. regional inventories as well in our EU storage package. ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Aug 17, 2021 | |
| It has been over a year of pandemic demand recovery. Some areas of the country have recovered their demand as anticipated and others like the Alberta province continue to surprise. The province is hitting on all cylinders as all factors of the economy are booming. But the record electric and natural gas demand is more than just a jump in economic activity. Record temperatures and oil sands processing have all been big factors which has led to a increase in natural gas demand by .7 BCF per day which is a 14% gain over last year (more than half the gain has come from the latter which has been incentivized by the recovery in global crude prices. Figure 1 | Alberta Natural Gas Demand versus Temperatures for 2019(red), 2020(orange) and 2021(blue) in BCF/d On the back of economic ... » read more | |
| Monday Aug 16, 2021 | |
| The western power markets have been at the forefront of the conversation most of the summer as the price signals leading up the period of question took on scarcity as Palo Verde's forward curve priced in actions from last summer and took into account recent coal retirements and Desert Southwest heat. The Pacific Northwest rallied prior to the summer really kicking in as Mother Nature delivered an unique Water Year in the Pacific Northwest along with a heat dome for the ages. California on the other hand, tried to go with the two market mentioned but as CAISO system operators came out with tariff changes and comments of cutting exports, the market participants knew the market was not going to be drive off of economics per se but off of pre-emptive actions of procuring ... » read more | |
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