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| Thursday Oct 10, 2024 | |
| The month of October is displaying some extreme weather events starting with Hurricane Helene and Milton and ending with the above normal temperatures seen across the Westcoast states. In between the two are daytime highs in the low 80’s in the Upper Midwest while the South Central is holding its power demand profile while the wind is fluctuating. Figure 1 | Impact of Hurricanes and/or Tornados Starting with the hurricanes mentioned, the devastation around the two storms is massive as Helene stretched into part of the country that were once deemed safe from catastrophic events that make landfall along the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic Ocean coastline. Milton made landfall yesterday evening so the daylight hours will start to show the damage created by the category 3 ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Oct 9, 2024 | |
| With the month of September, comes the start of fall sports. NFL games take priority on the TV while nearby parks become crowded during local soccer practice and games. In our latest monthly report, we use the metaphor of showcase events, where club teams travel across the country to play in front of coaches for universities and pro teams, to explain the events in the energy space of the past month. Read on for a sneak peak of ‘September Showcase’. Figure 1 | Showcase Events Starting with the result of the September Energy Showcase, the graph below delivers the storyline on the natural gas front as the month started with the prompt month contract holding down the fort just under $2.00 with the first few days in the month pushing it higher by $0.20 ($2.10). After a week ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Oct 8, 2024 | |
| The first week of SPP was remarkable as mother nature delivered some late summer heat, driving energy demand up. From the first pane in the graph below, we have real-time and forecast load with the former represented by the shaded area and the latter in the form of a line, which applies to the other panes in this graph for real-time and forecast values. Load was elevated during this period, especially between 10/3 and 10/5, peaking at 40 GW. On the supply side, the wind generation was decent, with a couple of days with robust generation, notably on 10/2, 10/3, 10/5, which led to curtailments as, seen in the third pane from the top. As a result, net load was low, averaging in the low double digits on high wind days, as indicated in purple in the graph below. Figure 1 | SPP Daily ... » read more | |
| Monday Oct 7, 2024 | |
| California: the magic place where you can go to the beach on a 100+ degree day and by a pumpkin spice latte in the same season. While in other parts of North America people are digging up their winter coats, the Golden State found itself in a second summer. In a season of change Mother Nature decided to deliver more of the same. This brought us right back to the same, tight conditions of the summer gas and power markets. But in the case of the former, second summer was not like the first, with California’s spot gas prices rocketing up to previously unachievable heights. Figure 1 | 2024 Spot Gas Prices by Hub In some ways California’s start to October is very much like the summer before it. Triple digit highs in Sacramento? Check. High gas demand? Check. Good surfing? ... » read more | |
| Friday Oct 4, 2024 | |
| Growing up in the 1970s, a lot of my time and energy was spent riding my bike around to either play baseball, deliver newspapers, or buy comic books. Of the three hobbies, it was baseball really peaked my interest as it was and still is America's pasttime sport. The professional teams of that era were iconic and enduring as players tended to stay with teams for multiple years, and to my opinion, the most dominant of the time was the Cincinnati Reds, aka “The Big Red Machine”, stocked with talent and anchored by baseball’s all-time hit leader Pete Rose, aka “Charlie Hustle”. Pete died this past week, and I was thinking about his approach to baseball, not his indiscretions about gambling, which was to run as fast as he could for ... » read more | |
| Thursday Oct 3, 2024 | |
| With another cycle coming to an end earlier this week, the Pacific Northwest hydro system is looking at another change-over of the calendar as we had the kick-off the 2025 water year on Tuesday, October 1st. It’s a change-over period at Energy GPS as well, as we put together our full monthly hydro forecast for the new water year. Our forecast models flows at 60 dams throughout Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana as combination of starting reservoir elevations, projected dam operations throughout the water year tied to drafting for flow augmentation and flood risk management calculations, and support for salmon populations, migration, and breeding, unregulated water volumes from precipitation and snowpack leading to run-off entering the river system, and key ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Oct 2, 2024 | |
| With the start of October yesterday, shoulder season and the nuclear outages that come with it are firmly upon us. We wrote a report back in August about our expectations for this fall’s nuclear outage season. Based on historical patterns, we looked at fall 2018 as the template for this year’s potential. As nuclear plants go out for refueling every 18 or 24 months, we needed to go back 6 years to find a season when a similar list of plants would be offline for maintenance. Turns out, fall 2018 had a very high number of outages, peaking at 16.8 GW in September and over 24 GW in October. In contrast, the last two fall nuclear seasons peaked under 12 GW in September and just over 21 GW in October. In this blog, we’ll check in on how this outage season is progressing thus ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Oct 1, 2024 | |
| October has arrived, ushering in the autumn season and marking a departure from the long summer days. As the weather shifts, the energy landscape is also subject to change. The extended hours of summer sunlight gradually shorten, and overnight and morning temperatures drop significantly. This period, often referred to as the shoulder season, is a time for maintenance as load decreases from summer's peak levels. Generators are fine-tuned in preparation for the upcoming winter season, and outage activity is now in full swing. Over the past month, the number of offline generators has increased. As illustrated in the graph below, outages in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) have reached just below the 20 GW mark, and we anticipate this figure will rise as October progresses. Figure 1 | SPP ... » read more | |
| Monday Sep 30, 2024 | |
| Prior to the influx of renewables mandated by the State of California, the summer-time peaking load relied on both transmission flows from adjacent balancing regions, base load nuclear and in-state natural gas-fired generators that sat in the LA Basin, the middle portion of the CAISO footprint known as ZP26 and Northern California. Over the past few years, the once common relationship between supply and demand has given way to the influx of renewable energy known as wind, solar and now batteries. There are still moments when the grid relies heavily on the ‘old school’ supply/demand balance as net load delivers a shape that exposes the later afternoon and evening ramp block of hours. Once we transition to lower power demand days, the days of a slow transition ... » read more | |
| Friday Sep 27, 2024 | |
| The figure below shows the daily low and average SP15 RTM prices from January – August 2024. This spring, average daily prices settled at negative numbers on some days while hourly prices reached as low as negative -$103/MWh. Across Q2 2024, the SP15 solar capture ratio (solar-weighted average divided by all-hours simple average) was -40%. These are pretty shocking numbers! Figure 1 | Daily Average SP15 RTM Prices, 2024 As we have discussed in many of our reports, prices reached these low levels for two reasons – (1) grid operations relied on renewable curtailments to balance the system (2) solar projects priced their energy in the CAISO at the negative of the REC value. Turns out there is a bit of a short squeeze occurring in the REC markets with 2024 vintage PCC1 ... » read more | |