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| Thursday Jul 18, 2024 | |
| The heat in the Pacific Northwest has been nothing short of sweltering so far this month as Mother Nature has delivered blistering temperatures to both the Northwest and Northeastern United States in recent days. AESO has been flirting with prices near the cap earlier this week and is facing rising net load numbers once again today as the load is still present and the forecast has wind on the decline. Down on the US side of the border the grid has seen hydro power output shift intraday to flex and lengthen the afternoon/evening ramp but fail to shift the overall flat average generation until the past 2-3 days. Starting around the 4th of July holiday and leading up through last weekend the focus at the top of the Columbia main stem has been on holding back a portion water ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jul 17, 2024 | |
| For batteries in CAISO, the fleet started out mostly participating in ancillary services. Once the fleet’s capacity surpassed the required amount needed to provide the relevant AS services, the transition began. More batteries started participating in the day-ahead and real-time energy markets, more dispatch started making its way on the grid, and AS prices fell in relation to opportunities for day-ahead and real-time energy arbitrage. We’ve been monitoring this same transition for the ERCOT battery fleet. It started last March in ‘The Case of the Missing Dispatch’. In that special report, we predicted the fleet would saturate the ancillary service markets, find more revenue opportunities in capturing day-ahead and real-time energy arbitrage, and dispatch more to ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jul 16, 2024 | |
| In the past, we have talked about how the wind generation has been relatively strong in June 2024 in SPP. Mother nature continues to be generous with plenty of wind volumes during as observed the first half of this month compared to what we have seen in the past two years. From the figure below, we have a 12 by 24 graph showing the net load components (load and wind generation), and thermal generation from 2022 through July 15th. It should be noted that the month of July 2024 includes only the first 15 days of the month. Figure 1 | SPP 12x24 Profile, 2022-2024 The generation from the blades has been especially strong this month during the midday block of hours while hovering somewhat at the same level seen in the past two years across the early morning and evening hours. On average, the ... » read more | |
| Monday Jul 15, 2024 | |
| Friday's office exercise was titled 'spot the difference' where everyone was given 30 minutes to deliver their storyline tied to the West cash market. Below are a few highlights from the healthy in-office conversation and detail tied to the daily and weekly commentary associated to content delivered via the EneryGPS West Power and Natural Gas product offering. Post the 4th of July holiday, Friday the 5th rolled by with unimpressive day-ahead power settles in CAISO (and the West) despite the hottest temperatures and the highest peak load of the year to date. Once we moved into the full work week period, the pricing construct started to change as the day ahead settles started climbing despite similar loads within California. For example, the 11th saw the peak ... » read more | |
| Friday Jul 12, 2024 | |
| Several years ago I worked on a hydro purchase power agreement for a municipality located in the Pacific Northwest. Anyone who works in the hydro space knows that the first challenge is to figure out what a “normal” water year looks like. We gathered forty years of streamflow data and pulled together our various scenarios for developing a production profile from which we could build a revenue forecast. When we had the rough draft of the results completed, the project manager said that we had to run these results by Chris down in the sustainability department. Chris was extremely concerned about climate change and thought that our historical analysis was likely going to provide the wrong answer. Chris’ thesis was that climate change would adversely impact the hydro ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jul 11, 2024 | |
| Hurricane season in the gulf is always an active time for an energy analyst as Mother Nature is in the habit of throwing a wrench in the energy grid. A few years ago it was winter storm Uri, which brought freezing temperatures blanketing much of the country and pushing ERCOT’s gas and power infrastructure beyond its ability to cope, bringing sky-high prices and sparking the conversation that culminated in ERCOT making significant revisions to its ORDC rules and lowering the price cap to the $5,000 still in force today. This summer it is Hurricane Beryl—the earliest category 5 hurricane to form since 2005’s Katrina. Beryl made landfall at the start of the week, toppling power lines and wreaking devastation starting in eastern Texas and spreading east and ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jul 10, 2024 | |
| We called it the first test of summer in our AESO Market flash on Monday and it was quickly followed by the second test yesterday in Alberta. Temperatures broke records in the province with highs in the upper 80s and low 90s. It led to a record-breaking level of demand for Q3 yesterday and an emergency alert called on Monday night. The heat isn’t over as Alberta’s newly coal-free grid continues to face tests in the summer heat. Figure 1 | July 8th Power Pool Prices and Temperatures Forecasts from Atmospheric G2 Peak demand jumped a gigawatt from 10.7 GW last week to 11.7 GW on Tuesday night, but it was Monday night’s demand that came with 10.9 GW of net load. Wind generation fell Monday morning and stayed under 0.3 GW for the rest of the day. Pool prices settled between ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jul 9, 2024 | |
| The natural gas world has seen a lot of molecules flowing around in every pipeline, not only in the Lower 48, but also in Canada. The combination of a mild winter and robust natural gas production is the reason why the storage caverns are ahead of time. The graph illustrated below displays the storage levels in Alberta from 2020 to July 2024. The year 2020 is in grey, 2021 in dark blue, 2022 in orange, 2023 in yellow and 2024 in light blue. Figure 1| Alberta’s storage level, 2020-2024 The previous withdrawal season ended with 301.25 BCF in storage (after 2023-2024 winter season) which was extremely high at that time of year. If we look back in the past years, 2021 is the closest at 210 BCF following a year of peak covid period which led to low demand levels. So far this ... » read more | |
| Monday Jul 8, 2024 | |
| High power prices result in high heat rates and consequently more of the natural gas generator fleet can profitably turn on. In other words, more demand for power means more demand for gas. This was the case in California when the North (NP15 or PG&E service territory) hit near record high temperatures on June 3rd. Sure enough demand followed with a 0.355 BCF DoD increase in PG&E. Confusingly, the PG&E spot NG price had a DoD drop of $0.62. So, when demand increases and price deceases we must turn to supply. Figure 1 | California Regional Natural Gas Demand Summary (MMBcf/d) by Region From June 24th to July 3rd daily NG imports into California increased from 3.06 BCF to 4.37 BCF. This brought supply to comparable levels to those seen in June and July 2023, which were record ... » read more | |
| Friday Jul 5, 2024 | |
| June brought a significant increase in total system load to ERCOT—not only a large increase month-on-month (54 GW in May, compared to 62.1 GW in June), but also a significant increase year-over-year. At over 62 GW, this June beat out June of 2023 by 2.5 GW. Some of this came down to the structural load growth that has been in the conversation in ERCOT heading into the summer, but Texas also saw temperatures that were significantly hotter than normal for most of the month. All of the hot and sunny weather was great for solar generation, which continued to provide peak output close to 20 GW on the sunniest days. However, the figure below shows that wind also performed extremely well, especially for the time of year, when the more typical trend is for wind to die down with the ... » read more | |