Featured Articles
| Thursday Sep 15, 2016 | |
| As of September 7th, HE 20 MST Palo Verde Unit 1 tripped offline due to a stuck open pressurized main spray value. The next morning, NRC posted that the unit itself was 100% offline and would continue to stay offline until the situation was resolved. Figure 1 | NRC Notes on Palo Verde Unit 1 As a result of the unit being offline, the Desert Southwest flows into California started to shift down on the 8th but really dropped for the CAISO day-ahead market on the 9th. Figure 2 | Palo Verde Day-Ahead Flows - Hourly Heavy Load Hours Figure 2 illustrates this as the ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Sep 14, 2016 | |
| Looking at the most recent weather models we are seeing a brief cold spell spread across the Midwest in the short-term, followed by a wave of above normal temperatures which sweep across the entire US through the end of the month. Above normal temperatures are nothing new this summer as prolonged heat across the country has kept gas demand (power burns) strong, which has helped eat away as the big surplus of gas in storage coming out of a warm winter. However, as we enter the back half of September it is important we adjust our expectations as ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Sep 13, 2016 | |
| Most of the market was surprised to see the front NYMEX natural gas contract up 10 cents as they walked in the door yesterday morning. After all, North American load had dropped to fall like levels after a very hot summer and there was no heat in the forecast. Saturdays load was expected to be right at the same levels witnessed over the Labor Day weekend. If that materialized, then we could expect natural gas power burns to drop down to 30 BCF or lower for Saturday and Sunday. That did not happen. Most market participants were surprised to see that the power burns ... » read more | |
| Monday Sep 12, 2016 | |
| With the middle of September upon us, Mother Nature continues to give the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic summer-like weather with highs in New York City tapping 90 degrees this Wednesday while Boston is looking at the mid 80's as its high. Figure 1 | New York City Temperatures - Actual and Forecast From a natural gas perspective, this is one of the reasons the overall power burns stayed above the 30 BCF mark over the weekend. Figure 2 | US Power Burns - Daily Another reason is due to the coal generation shifting down in both MISO and SPP over the weekend while the ... » read more | |
| Friday Sep 9, 2016 | |
| This week we found a CAISO report that piqued our interest. Buried in an unmarked spot on the CAISO website is the “Daily Wind and Solar Curtailment Report.” Below is a screen shot of the data contained in the CAISO report: Table 1 | CAISO Daily Wind and Solar Curtailment Report Sample http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Wind_SolarReal-TimeDispatchCurtailmentReportSep07_2016.pdf This report is intriguing because of the level of detail provided and the breakdown of the data. Here is a brief description of each column: Date and Hour – These are date/time ... » read more | |
| 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 | |