Featured Articles
| Thursday Sep 8, 2016 | |
| For those who do not live in the western world, the Pacific Gas and Electric Baja Path is a stretch of natural gas transport that connects volumes flowing to Southern California to the Bay Area in Northern California. Combined with the Redwood path connecting natural gas supply from Canada, the two pipes make up the main arteries that supply the Bay area population. With the ever changing natural gas landscape in California (Aliso Canyon) over the next few months and into 2017 there will be big changes to the pricing and flow of natural gas on each of these ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Sep 7, 2016 | |
| Over Labor Day weekend the United States experienced what has proven to be a rare event this summer as average temperatures fell near normal. The brief downturn in the weather conditions coupled with diminished holiday demand drove US net load below 300 GWa for Saturday and Sunday. Figure 1| North America Net Load The mild weather was short lived as a heat wave moves through US this week, pushing net load let back above 380 GWa for Thursday. However, looking past the initial 5 day forecast we see substantial downside in the ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Sep 6, 2016 | |
| Two months ago, we rolled out our California Tracker package, which includes a weekly report that breaks down what is going on within the state of California from both a power and natural gas perspective. This past week, we focused on the impact that power imports have on the CAISO grid, especially the net thermal demand across the hourly profile. Figure 1 | CAISO Thermal Demand The impact can really be seen during the later afternoon/evening ramp hours, where the grid is coming off the solar highs and load is still relatively high as entities on the grid ... » read more | |
| Friday Sep 2, 2016 | |
| With the long weekend almost upon us, this seems like a good opportunity to momentarily divert our attention from the energy markets to a more important topic – PIZZA! EnergyGPS staff likes pizza almost as much as we like numbers. So imagine or delight when we decided to find the best “slice” pizza in Portland through a multi-round bracket system. The competition started back in April (spurred by the NCAA Basketball Tournament bracket concept) and the champion was crowned at the end of July. Through the process we ate a lot of pizza, developed ... » read more | |
| Thursday Sep 1, 2016 | |
| There was a time in our not so distant past that a category 1 hurricane in the Gulf would throw a panic into the natural gas market. The Lower 48 at the time generated over 10% of the total production volume. With the development of the Marcellus and Utica production areas, offshore investment has plummeted and now Gulf production represents less than 3% of total natural gas production. The threat to supply has been minimized with the discovery of onshore tight gas shale plays. Despite the decreased percentage of production in the Gulf, the recent formation of ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Aug 31, 2016 | |
| As we look at our supply/demand forecasts for the upcoming holiday weekend we see significant length being added to the grid, especially in the Northeast and Midwest regions. As demand declines over the next 5 days we are faced with the question: Where will the excess natural gas go as power burns fall? We believe the answer comes in the form of increased exports to Canada over the Eastern interconnects. In order to get a better understanding, lets take a look at how the world looked during the first 10 days of July. As you can see ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Aug 30, 2016 | |
| As we inch closer to the long Labor Day weekend, the Pacific Northwest's weather pattern is starting to show us a little bit of fall. The leaves are turning color as the daytime temperatures are expected to drop down into the upper 60's by tomorrow with some precipitation in the forecast through Friday. Figure 1 | Portland Daily Weather - Forecast vs. Actual This weather pattern is quite a change from the previous two weeks where temperatures started to climb as the week was coming to an end. For example, two weekends ago the Friday temperature in ... » read more | |
| Monday Aug 29, 2016 | |
| With August coming to an end and Labor Day weekend right around the corner, many schools will be in session over the next couple of weeks which should add some power demand to the regional grids. From a weather perspective, the early part of this week will see the net load increase to similar levels as last week with ERCOT leading the way. Figure 1 | ERCOT Net Load - Hourly The Northeast markets are not far behind Monday and Tuesday as the likes of NEISO, NYISO and PJM are all showing their respective peaks sometime between Monday and Tuesday. Figure 2 | NYISO Daily ... » read more | |
| Friday Aug 26, 2016 | |
| For many years I have been a fan of the analysis put out by a small group of economists who research and write about California energy and environmental markets. Severin Borenstein, James Bushnell, and Frank Wolak have all been deeply engrossed in California’s electricity markets since the 1990’s, serving at various times as members of the CAISO Market Surveillance Committee as well as the Economic Analysis and Allocation Committee at the California Air Resources Board (CARB). While the CAISO and CARB lack independence and are extensions of the California ... » read more | |
| Thursday Aug 25, 2016 | |
| Since the market's prompt month closed last Friday (the forward curve shifted down $0.08-0.09 depending on the month) at $2.58 it has done nothing but go up this week as it ended Wednesday's trade date closing out around $2.80. So what caused the $0.22 you might ask? Look no further than Mother Nature, as she came out of the weekend with something to say. First, she started with the Pacific Northwest as temperatures are going to be in the 91-95 degree range towards end of the week. Second, the South Central portion of the country saw an uptick ... » read more | |