Featured Articles
| Tuesday Nov 1, 2016 | |
| In this newsletter we evaluate the wisdom of the California Air Resource Board’s recent proposals to modify the Energy Imbalance Market (EIM) rules to stop out-of-state carbon emissions from leaking into California via the EIM. A good newsletter title pulls themes together in a succinct, informative, and sometimes humorous way. We considered a variety of titles for this newsletter, before settling on a suite of titles, each one relevant in its own way. Penny wise and pound foolish. (1) Can’t see the forest for the trees. (2) Measure with a micrometer ... » read more | |
| Monday Oct 31, 2016 | |
| Happy Halloween!! It is that time of year again when the bowls are filled with candy and the pumpkins are carved with lights flickering inside as you walk up to front of the door with the children to hear the words: Trick or Treat!!!. The smile on the persons face delivery the candy is precious awhile the little ones are thankful and ready to move onto the next house as their bag needs to get full so they can go home and eat a bunch of it prior to going to bed as the school looms the next morning. The sporting world has its own version of ... » read more | |
| Friday Oct 28, 2016 | |
| This week a notice from the California Public Utilities Commission to SoCal Gas was posted on the CPUC/AlisoCanyon website detailing the process and hurdles that need to be met before the facility will be approved for operation. The good news about the notice is that there is a clear path that SoCal can follow to resume injections at Aliso Canyon. The bad news is that the reporting requirement is onerous. While most of the data/information request would have already been compiled during the summer-long repair and inspection process, some of the equipment and tracking ... » read more | |
| Thursday Oct 27, 2016 | |
| This week we are seeing the slow transition from summer/fall temperatures into winter space heating in the Northeast part of the United States and Eastern Canada. As heating degree days start to accumulate across this area, residential and commercial natural gas demand will start to dominate the daily supply/ demand balancing. Looking at some of the pipeline data scrapes this week we noticed several storage caverns starting to withdraw volumes for exactly this purpose. But noting we are still 6 days away from the start of the natural gas withdrawal season, we ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Oct 26, 2016 | |
| The first real cold front has moved into New England driving temperatures down across the region. As a result we have seen a substantial increase in res/com demand and an appropriate reaction from the gas market with AGT settling well above Henry Hub thus far this week. In figure 1 below, we have charted the total res/com sendouts for the Algonquin pipeline on the Y-axis and the average Boston temperatures on the X-axis. The data includes all days in October – March for 2012- 2016. The orange dots represent the last 15 days and blue is historical data. » read more | |
| Tuesday Oct 25, 2016 | |
| Since October 3rd, 2016 we have seen .340 BCF of firm transport sign up with the last two weeks having the biggest impact. Figure 1 | TCPL Contracting from 10/3/2016 to 10/24/2016 The majority of the added firm transport is apart of a one-year strip from this October to October 2017. As you can see in the table above, there was a transaction that extended out further (.0138 BCF), which was a three year deal. We mention this due to the fact there has been talks about TCPL wanting to sign up 10 year deals, but we have yet to see any movement on that front ... » read more | |
| Monday Oct 24, 2016 | |
| Over the past 6 weeks, Texas weather has been coming in quite a bit above normal with the Houston metro area staring at highs in the 90's as late as this past Wednesday. Thursday and Friday saw temperatures drop and the forecast is calling for highs in the mid 80's this week. Figure 1 | Houston Temperatures - Actual vs. Forecast This big drop in temperatures led to the net load in ERCOT to shift down, which then put downward pressure on the demand for natural gas used to generate power. As a result, the spread between Houston Ship Channel (HSC) and ... » read more | |
| Friday Oct 21, 2016 | |
| We have done a lot of analysis over the last couple of years related to the CAISO EIM and the possibility of expanding the CAISO into a regional organization. There are plenty of studies estimating the benefits associated with expanding the CAISO in some capacity. For the most part these studies show benefits for both the CAISO and the balancing authorities that opt to join the CAISO. While we don’t always agree with the modeling assumptions or the magnitude of the benefits in these studies, we generally think that centralized markets work better and are more ... » read more | |
| Thursday Oct 20, 2016 | |
| Last Friday night, the routine of shuttling the kids to their respective 'futsal' training sessions (Braziallian type of soccer) when things got interesting as the calm before the storm arose and slammed Portland proper with a massive amount of rain that lasted a good 35-40 minutes. In fact, earlier that day tornados touched down in Manzanita, OR which is a small coastal town. The local news showed extensive damage along the main road leading to the Pacific Ocean. The weather forecasters were expecting tornado like winds to move through the ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Oct 19, 2016 | |
| As move our way though October temperatures begin to decline as fall conditions set in across the US. Typically when we enter the shoulder months power burns hit their lows as temperatures gravitate toward that happy medium in which there is little cooling or heating demand. However, power burns have remained strong through the first half of the month with October MTD averaging 26.7 BCF/d. Temperatures have remained above average across the majority of the country, inflating load and sustaining strong burns. However, there are other factors at ... » read more | |