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| Wednesday Oct 4, 2023 | |
| On September 24th, the CAISO fleet hit a new peak dispatch of over 5 GW. It was a sign of both the growth of the fleet, as well as the conditions of the day. The figure below is featured in our daily CAISO Battery Dashboard from September 30th. The blue and orange shaded sections represent the net charge and discharge of the fleet respectively while the black line shows SP15 real-time price. The 24th was a Sunday with negative midday prices and a large price spike in the evening. It’s the ideal price shape for capturing real-time arbitrage for batteries that tend to charge midday, dispatch a little in the morning, and dispatch a lot in the evening. The fleet only discharged around 3 GW in response to the highest price of the day, but when price peaked a second time less than an hour ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Oct 3, 2023 | |
| The transition to renewable resources is something that has evolved over time and specific regions have their respective technology footprint that works its way into the power supply stack and all the analysis around the implied heat rate that reflects the marginal megawatt needed to balance the grid. The marginal megawatt could come in the form of a natural gas-fired generator or the need to curtail the renewable megawatt we are striving to increase in the coming years. The former takes on a level between 8.0 and 14.0 depending on how high one has to go into the gas stack while the later turns to a level that starts out driving the implied heat rate below the levels mentioned and ultimately shift into negative territory as the outright auction price settle goes crosses over ... » read more | |
| Monday Oct 2, 2023 | |
| October brings with it leaves changing colors and a nice crispness to the air as the overnight lows shift lower while the daytime highs do not seem as extreme despite days where temperatures can still top the 90-degree level across the Lower 48. This is going to be the case this week in California as the model runs have some heat showing up starting on Tuesday and lasting into the weekend. With one of the Diablo Canyon nuclear units offline for its planned refueling maintenance, the power grid is losing roughly 1.1 GWa of baseload energy. Figure 1 | October is Fall Season The good news for the CAISO system operators is the Hunt for Red October should not be feared as much as the Hunt for Flex October is the new best-selling novel on the market. The latest Special ... » read more | |
| Friday Sep 29, 2023 | |
| The month of September is about to come to a close, and with the end of the third quarter comes the expectation that cooler temperatures will arrive. The hope is that the fall weather will bring some relief from the high load brought on by the summer heat, and, in ERCOT, that wind generation will pick back up. Figure 1 | ERCOT Wind and Solar 12x24 Profiles, 2021 – 2023 YTD In the figure above, which is part of our ERCOT Real Time Dashboard, the top pane shows monthly/hourly average wind generation, the middle pane shows solar, and the bottom shows the combination of the two, from 2021 – the present. This is a graph that we discuss with some regularity, often in the context of the HE20 problem, and the item that we want to highlight today is the overall average level of ... » read more | |
| Thursday Sep 28, 2023 | |
| When we sat down at our desks this morning at Energy GPS HQ in Portland, the soft pitter-patter of rainfall against the roof and windows was a gentle reminder that we have left summer behind and that fall has arrived. Later in the day the drizzle had become a torrential downpour, a welcome occurrence after a dry summer in the Pacific Northwest, especially up further north from Portland into British Columbia. In BC, the dryness issues go back to last winter. While the rest of the Northwest south of the border was enjoying relatively strong precipitation (although nothing compared to California’s record snowfall, compliments of a series of atmospheric river events that hit the coast unusually far to the south), BC watch as its snow levels struggled to reach 60% of ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Sep 27, 2023 | |
| The Aliso Canyon storage shut-in starts today. It’s scheduled to last a little more than 2 weeks and will greatly limit SoCal Gas’ injection capability during the last big push to fill before winter. Just last month, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) announced their decision to add 27 BCF of availability capacity to the cavern which has been limited since a 2015 spill. While this shut-in has been listed on SoCal Gas’ Maintenance Outlook for a while now, it was unclear until about two weeks ago whether they would go through with the work given the new capacity to fill. Then on September 15th, the shut-in was made definite as it was added to the Maintenance Schedule and the road to full for Aliso Canyon got a little more complicated. Figure 1 | SoCal Gas ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Sep 26, 2023 | |
| The heat dome that blanketed the South Central all summer has dissipated over the past few weeks, but it still goes without saying that temperatures hitting the low 90’s is still quite warm all things considered, especially at the end of September when the power supply stack is working its way towards planned outages. Figure 1 | ERCOT Net Load Daily Profile – 7 Day Rolling Average Adding some fuel to the fire is the simple fact that the wind generation across the Lone Star State has been a mixture of higher early morning output while the middle of the day and evening ramp continues to be lower. The figure above can be found in the EnergyGPS ERCOT Morning Dashboard, which is part of the South Central Power sub-package and folds into the North American Power and Natural ... » read more | |
| Monday Sep 25, 2023 | |
| The month of September has flown as this week presents the last few days left before October takes over on Sunday. This means the transition between summer and fall is upon us as football season is in full gear and the leaves are starting to change colors. One the clocks move back their hour and the leaves start to make their way to the ground, the shift will hit home in a big way. The same is true for the electricity sector as the summer months were filled with extreme heat across the South Central which pushed the natural gas generators to heightened alert and record setting usage for long stints. Now that we are finalizing Q3-2023, the power grids will be in transition where the renewable space will need to be analyzed along with the thermal supply stack planned ... » read more | |
| Friday Sep 22, 2023 | |
| Back in the late 1990’s a creative trader wanted to get long the entire US power sector. He put out a request to the brokers for offers in all major power markets for what became known as the “Around the USA” trade. It was a bullish bet on the overall level of US power markets. I hadn’t thought much about that trade in the ensuing years until a new Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) came across my radar over the summer. An outfit called CNIC Funds is behind this ETF, and they are working with ICE to bring the opportunity to buy the entire US electricity commodity sector to retail investors. (https://www.cnicfunds.com/) The ETF launched in May 2023, its ticker is AMPD, and you can log into your brokerage account and buy it. On Wednesday it closed at about $25 per ... » read more | |
| Thursday Sep 21, 2023 | |
| Throughout August and into the beginning of September, Mother Nature subjected the Lone Star State to unbearable heat. The summer of 2023 has been one of Texas’s hottest summers on record, with several cities hitting 100-degree temperatures for more than 40 days in a row. Our recent Newsletter Special Report, “Scorching Summer” discusses the severity of the recent heat and its impact on ERCOT prices. Every single day in August (and September so far) was hotter than the 5-year average, as illustrated by the figure below, which shows daily average temperatures in the top pane and differences from normal in the bottom pane. Figure 1 | Temperatures, August 2023 To say that these temperatures resulted in consistently high demand for electricity is somewhat ... » read more | |