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| Thursday Apr 17, 2025 | |
| So far in 2025, ERCOT has established itself as a true rival with CAISO for the title of solar supremacy. ERCOT saw significant gains in solar capacity during the first three months of 2025, reaching a new all-time high for solar potential with 24.2 GW during March. The average hourly solar profile was reaching an average of 18.2 GW during March as well, up nearly 6 GW year-over-year. Just the past couple of days in ERCOT, solar output has topped 24 GW during the middle of the day, pushing past CAISO’s post-curtailment output which hasn’t topped 21 GW yet in April. The impressive solar performance to start out 2025 was not limited to ERCOT, but shared by other markets across the country including PJM, MISO, and yes, CAISO. But with the solar ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Apr 16, 2025 | |
| The beginning of April usually sees a steep ramp up in nuclear outages, but this spring’s outage profile has been bit unique. The figure below is displayed in our NRC Nuclear Plant Summary dashboard and is updated daily. Nuclear outage peaked early this year at the end of March. Total outages reached 21.6 GW on March 29th. Over the following week, several plants wrapped up their regular maintenance and began slowly returning to the grid, along with a couple plants with unplanned maintenance. The result was 7.3 GW back online by April 8th, a dramatic drop in outages during a time when outages usually grow. Figure 1 | Total Nuclear Plant Outage (MW) Outages have since regained some steam and as of yesterday sat just below the 20 GW mark. Many plants are still in the middle of their ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Apr 15, 2025 | |
| The 2024-2025 winter season kicked off with strong market fundamentals, following a summer marked by oversupply. Production remained robust across both Canada and the Lower 48, while weather conditions were relatively moderate—average in Canada and slightly warmer than normal in the U.S. With limited heating demand, gas was injected aggressively into storage. The conversation at the time revolved around AECO’s capacity constraints and how far the price spreads would push storage utilization. By mid-November, AECO storage hit its peak at 468 Bcf. From there, withdrawals began in response to shifting fundamentals. Without any action, the system risked becoming oversaturated given the high starting point. Figure 1 | Alberta Storage Inventory - Daily November’s mild ... » read more | |
| Monday Apr 14, 2025 | |
| The start of the second quarter is a time that many natural gas pipelines take on maintenance work as the winter load has faded and the need for molecules is subdued given the power burn numbers are muted now that the renewable penetration volume is seen with both wind and solar present. The West regional pipeline work starts up in British Columbia and ends in the Desert Southwest while California is dealing with weekends of negative pricing that is driving down the power burn numbers across PGAE, Kern and SoCal Gas. Starting with the pipeline maintenance, the West Capacity Dashboard (published daily), details the key pipelines that we monitor across each region and displays the current forecasted capacity, the previous reported volume and the actual flows. Figure 1 | BC Spectra ... » read more | |
| Friday Apr 11, 2025 | |
| Donald Trump has issued a few Executive Orders related to the United States energy sector in recent weeks. As with most of Trump’s Executive Orders, it is hard to determine whether they will (a) withstand legal challenges and (b) have the purported impact. Figure 1 | Overreach Executive Orders In our Special Report published yesterday, we discussed the impact of three of the recent Executive Orders: REGULATORY RELIEF FOR CERTAIN STATIONARY SOURCES TO PROMOTE AMERICAN ENERGY, STRENGTHENING THE RELIABILITY AND SECURITY OF THE UNITED STATES ELECTRIC GRID, and PROTECTING AMERICAN ENERGY FROM STATE OVERREACH. The last one of these is particularly interesting as it resulted in an immediately-visible market impact. This order is straightforward – the Attorney General must (a) ... » read more | |
| Thursday Apr 10, 2025 | |
| One week ago, we blogged about the start of spring fish spill in the Pacific Northwest on the hydro system. Each spring on April 3rd, the four dams in the Lower Snake River basin begin allocating a large portion of all flows to spill rather than energy generation, sharply dropping the hourly output. The start of spring spill is followed one week later by another four projects, this time on the Lower Columbia, also transitioning to greater spill. The changes are cutting output from a portion of the system while at the same time overall flows are on the rise, between increased runoff and warmer temperatures prompting snow melt, along with water coming out from storage as Grand Coulee dam at the head of the Upper Columbia is about to start drafting to meet updated ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Apr 9, 2025 | |
| After a brief springtime chill, Alberta temperatures are flipping back above normal for the next couple of weeks. The figure below shows Alberta temperature forecasts weighted by population. Moving from left to right in the figure gives you more recent forecasts for the same day on the y-axis. The end of March and a few days at the beginning of April had average temperatures dropping below 30 degrees F. The coldest day averaged close to 20 degrees F. By this Monday, average temperatures rose by more than 20 degrees, crossing the 50-degree mark. The orange and red coloration, indicating above normal temperatures, is set to extend through the end of the 15-day forecast. The recent warmth, along with high renewable generation, is good timing for the AESO grid as thermal outages are starting ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Apr 8, 2025 | |
| Spring is in full swing, and in the energy sector, that signals the start of maintenance season. This is the time of year when power generators—after operating heavily through the winter—are taken offline for planned outages. These essential tune-ups help ensure the fleet is in top condition before summer, when demand surges again. Just as nature resets and prepares for growth during spring, the energy sector uses this period to recalibrate for the challenges ahead. Since March, we’ve been closely tracking outages across various ISOs, and things seem to be unfolding differently this year compared to past seasons. As markets continue to evolve across the U.S.—driven by factors like increasing load, growing renewable penetration, and a rising share of battery ... » read more | |
| Monday Apr 7, 2025 | |
| Power burns are a key component to the natural gas balancing conversation where in years past the common dialogue was around coal to natural gas-fired generation switching. Such conversations waned over the years as coal retirements were substantial, thus losing market share. Throw in the renewable transition where wind and solar interplayed with each other and disrupted the entire thermal fleet leaving more flexible resources readily available for the system operators, which did not bode well for the remaining coal plants that typically like to track load that is not in the form of net load. Net load takes the power demand profile and subtracts out wind and solar by region. Figure 1 | MISO Wind and Solar 12x24 Profiles The graph above displays the MISO wind and solar ... » read more | |
| Friday Apr 4, 2025 | |
| The California Resource Adequacy (RA) Program was started in 2004 and requires LSEs to maintain system, local, and flexible RA to ensure a reliable energy grid and to incentivize new resources for future grid reliability. The system RA capacity requirements for each LSE are based on a peak load plus PRM (e.g., 17%), the local RA requirements are based on local constraints determined with a 1-in-10 weather year an N-1-1 contingency, and the flexible RA is based on the largest three-hour ramp for each month. A 24-hour slice of day framework will be used in 2024 as a test year before fully adopting in 2025. The 24-hour slice RA framework is meant to ensure that system reliability (load plus planning reserve margin) would be met on the day of each month with the highest coincident ... » read more | |