Featured Articles
| Tuesday Jun 13, 2017 | |
| It has been a mild spring across the Lower 48. There have been few heat events and the electricity systems have behaved somewhat orderly compared to previous years despite a very robust outage sesason. Mother Nature flipped the switch yesterday turning spring into summer in a matter of hours. From Friday into Monday the daytime highs from Chicago over to the I-95 corridor ... » read more | |
| Monday Jun 12, 2017 | |
| This past weekend was setting up to be more like an April weekend day rather than a typical June Saturday or Sunday when it comes to the power load across the West as well as the renewable generation. Starting in the Pacific Northwest, we saw the weather go from clear blue skies and plenty of sunshine to that of overcast weather with plenty of rainfall. In fact ... » read more | |
| Friday Jun 9, 2017 | |
| Power markets are curious beasts. They really are!! Electricity is a vital commodity with no substitutes (at least in the short term) and limited ability to store. Furthermore, for most consumers reading this newsletter, electricity is quite a bargain compared to the benefit consumers derive from the product. At least for me, you could increase the price of electricity by ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jun 8, 2017 | |
| The loss of the Aliso Canyon storage facility in the SoCal Gas system continues to plague California. The cavern was shut down in February of 2016 after a massive leak of natural gas was plugged. It took almost a year for residents evacuated from the area to return to their homes. Prior to the leak, the storage caverns were a ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jun 7, 2017 | |
| On May 31st Brayton Point coal shut its doors for good pulling 1,600 MWs of capacity out of the market. The unit was the last coal plant in Massachusetts and the largest non-NG fired generator in ISONE. Figure 1 | Brayton Point Coal Plant ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jun 6, 2017 | |
| As we enter the month of June, the hydro system in the Pacific Northwest usually sees its generation shift down as the storage facilities are in full refill mode. This year is looking to be an outlier when you compare it to the past two years as the generation output continue to be strong with no sight of the foot coming off the gas pedal. » read more | |
| Monday Jun 5, 2017 | |
| The day after the June Nymex contract rolled off the board, the July contract moved up roughly $0.07 to settle $3.31. This move up was on a 11-15 day forecast that was showing above normal temperatures across the Midwest and Eastern portion of the country. In fact, this was right around the time the CFTC Commitment of Traders was at its all-time high for the large ... » read more | |
| Friday Jun 2, 2017 | |
| This week the CAISO officially announced the addition of two new energy imbalance market (EIM) participants – Powerex and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP). These two announcements are a big deal. While Pacificorp receives full credit as the first-mover in the EIM, the addition of Powerex and LADWP takes the EIM to a whole new level. The devil is in ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jun 1, 2017 | |
| We have been writing about the water year in the Pacific Northwest for some time. The major theme was tied to the Snake River basin getting plenty of snow early while the Above Grand Coulee basin lagged. That was until February when the precipitation pattern dumped a tremendous amount of snow in Upper Washington, parts of Montana and British Columbia. This ... » read more | |
| Wednesday May 31, 2017 | |
| Through the majority of this spring the grid was tormented by unusually large amount of nuclear outages. The total amount of generation offline peaked at a little more than 25 GWs for the end of April which marked the highest outage total since 2013. Through the back half of May we have seen a rush of units return to the grid as nearly 10 GWs of ... » read more | |