Menu
Featured Articles
| Monday Mar 7, 2016 | |
| In the final days of the 2016 legislative session, the Oregon House and Senate passed Senate Bill 1547 which makes sweeping changes to Oregon’s renewable energy policy. Governor Kate Brown is expected to sign the bill into law in the coming weeks. This legislation will stimulate the development of incremental renewable resources in Oregon and surrounding states. By and large, it seems like a reasonably thought through piece of legislation that will bring additional renewable energy to Oregon within certain cost containment parameters. Having said that, the 19 ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 4, 2016 | |
| As per the notice on the Tallgrass website yesterday (Thursday). The Rockies Express production that was knocked out due to Tuesdays force majeure has started to return. All indications are that the 1 BCF/d of production should show up in tonight's evening cycle. Figure 1 | REX East Receipts - Daily When the outage occurred, REX increased the capacity of the Markwest receipt from 685 MDth/d to 725 MDth/d. Expect the capacity at this point to go back down to the original rating. The intended design of the point is only 600 MDth/d. The return of the ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 3, 2016 | |
| The Pacific Northwest is bracing itself for some more precipitation over the next 10 days. It is cold enough for the precipitation to be in the form of snow in the middle to upper elevation levels but the lower elevation will see plenty of rain. Figure 1 | National Weather Service - Pacific Northwest Precipitation Pattern This precipitation pattern has increased the overall MAF 6.3 for the Jan-July time period at The Dalles, with the most recent uptick being 1 full MAF (the previous report increased by 5.3 MAF) Figure 2 | NWRFC ESP Report - The Dalles As you ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 2, 2016 | |
| For the last two days the day ahead price of power in Buffalo NY as average $10 above the price of power in NYC for the on peak average. To understand why Buffalo NY has higher power prices then the largest city in United States we need to go back a little ways. In September 2012 NRG retired two 185 MW coal units at the Dunkirk plant in Western NY. The retirement of the units has created reliability issues for Western NY power grid ever since. In summary, the transmission grid in Western NY is a delicate balance between the 345 KV and 230 KV ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 1, 2016 | |
| Over the weekend, the 15 day forecast turned quite a bit warmer in the Midwest and Eastern part of the country as the overall average temperatures dropped by 43 hdds. Figure 1 | Weather Forecast Comparison - 2/29 vs. 2/26 The lack of demand led to hub cash trading down to $1.62 for the first day of March. Marcellus did not rebound after trading $0.93 over the weekend as it settled a penny higher at $0.94. On the supply side, Production has shifted back up to levels seen a couple of weeks back. There was some talk on the overall production falling last ... » read more | |
| Monday Feb 29, 2016 | |
| Last week we discussed the potential for an uptick wind development in the Pacific Northwest stemming from the 50% RPS bill that is making its way through the Oregon legislative process and the California 50% RPS requirements. The Oregon 50% RPS legislation is not a done deal, but it seems likely that if it doesn’t make it through the legislature in this session (ends in early March) it will likely be put on the ballot or will be re-introduced next year. These are great developments for the Northwest wind community. We haven’t seen activity like this in ... » read more | |
| Friday Feb 26, 2016 | |
| December was exceptionally warm in the Midwest, with Chicago temperatures averaging 10 degrees above normal for the month. Temperatures even reached a balmy 60 degrees around Christmas. Correspondingly, regional heating demand fell well below prior years. Sendouts averaged 9.8 bcf/d for the month, compared with 11.6 bcf/d in 2014 and 12.4 bcf/d in 2013. Accordingly, the Midwest region ended December with about 983 BCF of gas in storage, slightly above the previous 5-year maximum: Figure 1 | EIA Midwest Weekly Storage The hangover from the exceptionally warm December ... » read more | |
| Thursday Feb 25, 2016 | |
| As we discussed last week in one of the newsletters, both ERCOT and SPP saw record max wind hit their system. Such an increase, by default, is going to have an impact on the overall net power demand but it was not until I looked at the graph below did I realize just how much (some of it has to do with warmer temperatures the overall peak demand down, but most is due to the increasing wind capacity in ERCOT. Figure 1 | ERCOT's Net Load - Daily As you can see from the graph, we are well below the past two year's peak demand and the forecast is calling for that spread ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Feb 24, 2016 | |
| The end of Winter is in sight with less than a week remaining in February and the March NYMEX HH contract approaching expiration. Since early last week, the March contract has steadily declined as warm weather proliferated across the country. In light of recent HDD forecasts for early march, we believe the decline in the gas market is likely to continue. On the morning of the 22nd the outlook for the first week in March was relatively strong compared what we have seen thus far this winter as HDDs in the East were expected to be well above ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Feb 23, 2016 | |
| The powerburn analysis for the month of February can be divided into the front half of the month and the back half. Figure 1 | US Powerburns - Daily 7 Day Rolling Average As you can see in Figure 1, the front half of the month showed more power burns, with the majority of the output showing up in the South Central where ERCOT's net demand was stronger. The Midwest/East saw a little an uptick as well due to a barrage of nuclear units tripping during one of the cold snaps early in the month. Figure 2 | Nuclear Outages - Daily As we got to the back half of the ... » read more | |