Featured Articles
| Thursday May 11, 2017 | |
| The Commodity Futures Trading Commission issues a report every week that breaks down the open interest of the natural gas market by participant category. The intent of the report is to make sure no one group of traders has an undue influence on price in an effort to keep an orderly outcome. From the CFTC posting, we can gather plenty of information about total size of the ... » read more | |
| Wednesday May 10, 2017 | |
| Followers of the CAISO market or readers of this newsletter will be well aware of the issues surrounding California's large renewable generation portfolio which has occasionally driven negative price over DA HL hours. The negative prices typically clear through the middle of the day as solar generation ramps in. April saw multiple negative clears as shoulder ... » read more | |
| Tuesday May 9, 2017 | |
| Yesterday, EnergyGPS released over 50 pages of in-depth analysis on what is going on regarding Renewable Curtailments within the CAISO footprint. The first section breaks down how we have evolved to this point. It includes a little background on California's RPS and how the renewable growth has taken shape over the years. We also take a look at the Pacific ... » read more | |
| Monday May 8, 2017 | |
| The old adage of "April Showers, bring May Flowers" can we altered a little the past two month in the South Central region. It would go more like this, "March/April Wind, bring plenty of Generation to the grid". This has been the case in both SPP and ERCOT throughout the months of March and April. Before we get deep into the data, let us ... » read more | |
| Friday May 5, 2017 | |
| Last week I took a raft trip down the Owyhee River. The Owyhee is one of the most beautiful and remote rivers in Oregon. The headwaters of the Owyhee are located in Nevada. The river winds its way through southeastern Oregon before dumping into the Snake River along the Idaho-Oregon border. The ... » read more | |
| Thursday May 4, 2017 | |
| As I sit here and write this newsletter, the skies across Portland are clear blue and the temperature outside is 78 degrees!! We have not seen this type of weather in some time as the overall winter season has been quite cold and the current spring days have been below normal. This has kept both the rescom and power demand profiles above normal for this time of ... » read more | |
| Wednesday May 3, 2017 | |
| Looking at Power Burns recently we noticed what appears to be sharp shift over the last week compared to earlier in the month. With warm temperatures across the East and South Central region an increase in cooling demand was to be expected. Digging a little deeper, there is a larger story to tell. Figure 1 breaks down the last 30 days of power burns by net load ... » read more | |
| Tuesday May 2, 2017 | |
| The first week of May was expected to be warm but as of yesterday, the weather runs continue to turn it up a notch with Phoenix showing highs in the upper 90's, Burbank in the low 90's while up in the Pacific Northwest Portland is showing low 80's for tomorrow with Wednesday jumping up into the mid 80's. Figure 1 | CAISO Temperature ... » read more | |
| Monday May 1, 2017 | |
| With the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) in California, everyone is keeping an eye on what is happening on the ground. We have discussed terms like the 'Duck Curve' or 'Giraffe Neck' in previous newsletters. Each one of these terms are tied to the solar penetration within the state and how it is shifting down the prices in the middle of the day and keeping the morning/evening ramp hours quite high as well as the light load hours. Figure 1 | CAISO Day-Ahead Prices/Heat Rates - Daily You can see on weekends, the light load hours trade well above the ... » read more | |
| Friday Apr 28, 2017 | |
| If you live in the Pacific Northwest, this winter seems to be dragging as the last few days have brought us chilly overnight lows once again. In fact, I look at my thermostat every morning when I get up and see what it says about how cold it is in my house. With the furnace programmed to turn off in the evening and kick in sometime around 5:00 am, I can usually gauge how cold the temperatures got outside overnight as it shifts down to 62 degrees on a cold crisp day in the middle of winter and is up around 69 degrees on a warm spring day. When I awoke ... » read more | |