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| Wednesday May 10, 2023 | |
| April is a month of spring flowers, rain showers, and Easter bunnies in bowties. For those who celebrate the holiday, the festivities often include baskets full of multicolored plastic eggs that open with a satisfying pop to a candy surprise. Traditionally, each participant is given a single woven basket and told to find as many eggs as possible before the hunt is up. This flies in the face of the well-known saying, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’, which warns of investing everything in just one source. As the month of Easter ends, it’s an important adage for energy grids to remember as well. Supply stacks need to be diverse to ensure power is there when it’s needed. Most grids have a mix of supply sources, including intermittently available ... » read more | |
| Tuesday May 9, 2023 | |
| The days of wondering what the West is going to do with no water in the river systems, storage facilities or snowpack in the mountains seem to be in the distant past as the Pacific Northwest is getting its spring flush while California accumulated more snowpack to add the record setting 2023 period that started in early January. Table 1 | EnergyGPS 10-Day Generation and Stream Flow Actuals/Forecast The table above is a daily dashboard that we deliver to clients and is part of the EnergyGPS Pacific Northwest/California Hydro Package we offer to market participants that want to be on top of the regional market fundamentals tied to snowpack, stream flows and actual generation forecast that go out through a full Water Year. The top portion of the table breaks down the daily generation by ... » read more | |
| Monday May 8, 2023 | |
| ERCOT is looking at higher power demand today (May 8th) as temperatures are on the rise across the Lone Star State. This has led to the net load numbers rising as the wind profile continues to bring with it a shift down during the later afternoon hours and only starts to rise around the time the solar hours are coming to an end. Figure 1 | ERCOT Net Load Looking at the chart above, the gold dotted line represents the day-ahead hourly implied heat rate levels for the North Zone. The big spike up is meaningful as the turquois shaded area (net load) displays the highest level in the two-week window and has a bulge that sits within a Monday, which means coming out of the weekend. Taking a deeper look into the hourly price levels for the North Zone, the week-on-week levels jump out with ... » read more | |
| Friday May 5, 2023 | |
| There’s a saying around Energy GPS when we get it right – “High Fives All Around”! This has been coined by Tim Belden and used after successfully completing consulting projects. In particular, we use the phrase when our forecasts stand up to market actuals. It appears that the Department of Ecology is giving “High Fives All Around” based on its new carbon Cap and Invest Program. The Department held its first Carbon Allowance auction at the end of February where nearly 6.2 million carbon allowances (each allowance covers one metric ton of carbon emissions) were sold at $48.50/MT for a total of nearly $300 million dollars “raised”[1]. The Department of Ecology used the word “raised” instead of perhaps ... » read more | |
| Thursday May 4, 2023 | |
| Spring in the Pacific Northwest is always an exciting time as Mother Nature and the Northwest hydro system will keep you on your toes. The months of April and May are when we can see some of the most volatility in expectations for seasonal water supply. Each day brings new information with the transition from winter to spring—the change of dam operations to replenish the water lost from reservoirs during the winter as well as the pace of that refill, the timing and volume of snow melt and how that snow melt translates into river flows—and conditions can change rapidly. We saw a prime example of this last year late in the month of May. Since mid-March of 2022, the Jan-Jul seasonal water supply forecast at The Dalles had been trending down with a long ... » read more | |
| Wednesday May 3, 2023 | |
| With the first few weeks of spring in the rearview, outage season is well underway. With milder weather and demand levels, power plants across the country plan to complete their maintenance during the shoulder months of both spring and fall. This May there are more than a dozen nuclear plants currently 100% offline to do just that. For nuclear plants this is known as a refueling cycle and it occurs every 18 months or 2 years for each plant. Depending on the site and the year, refueling can be a more than month-long process where the plant is completely offline. The plants also take several days and sometimes weeks to ramp on and off in the periods before and after the planned maintenance. With nuclear plants offering important baseload energy for many regions of the country, these outages ... » read more | |
| Tuesday May 2, 2023 | |
| The ERCOT market continues to evolve as its renewable presence is tied to the trifecta of technologies known as wind, solar and batteries. The wind generation fleet is the most robust in North America as the West and South regions have the most growth in the past decade. Over the past few years, the solar fleet has grown to a point where the system operators will be looking at double digit peak gigawatts from this point forward as the profile continues its upward trajectory. Figure 1 | ERCOT Solar Cumulative Peak Such a feat was met in the first quarter of 2023 and now that we are starting the second month of Q2-2023, you can see from the chart above the cumulative solar peak is climbing as the skies are blue (up from 10.0 GW in Q1-2023 to 11.8 GW May-2023). The graph below ... » read more | |
| Monday May 1, 2023 | |
| The West hydro season is going to be kicking into high gear now that May is upon us and the weather has finally turned from the extended winter season to that of a nice warm-up period to end the month of April to closer to normal temperatures this week. All this will translate into snow melting at the lower to mid elevations while the upper elevation areas will be waiting until more sustained heat shows up. Figure 1 | California Daily Hydro Generation Flat Average The graph above displays the daily total CAISO hydro average for the 24-hour block with the x-axis displaying the calendar period while the y-axis displays the megawatt volume. We have added two water years with the gold tied to last year (2022), which was considered the second consecutive year of drought-like ... » read more | |
| Thursday Apr 27, 2023 | |
| The wild card of ERCOT power supply is wind. And occasionally a massive storm event, but on a day-to-day basis, its wind. So let’s briefly consider the topic of the interaction between wind, solar, net load, heat rates and prices in the context of this coming weekend in ERCOT as discussed in more detail in the article “Ringing the Dinner Bell in ERCOT”. Typically, wind is at its most robust in the evening hours in Texas but this weekend shapes up a little different. For April 29th and 30th, we have an anomalous pattern arising. Our wind output on the evening of April 29th is forecast to fall by over 20 GW over the course of just a few hours heading into the evening. This will occur in overnight hours when the ... » read more | |
| Thursday Apr 27, 2023 | |
| In our daily blog posts we like to give a different taste each day of the many different topics and questions we think about relating to energy and natural gas markets, and renewables. The taste of the day—or soup du jour—for this morning is an excerpt from our recent Newsletter Special Report, “MISO Supply Soup Ingredient – Solar”. Miso soup is a traditional Japanese soup consisting of a dashi stock into which softened miso paste is mixed. There are many optional ingredients, such as tofu and vegetables, that may be added depending on the regional/seasonal recipes and/or personal preference. The type of miso paste chosen for the soup defines its character and flavor as the fermenting process determines if a soup is lighter/sweeter (white ... » read more | |