MenuFeatured Articles
| Friday Jul 18, 2025 | |
| There have been a slew of reports surrounding the impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) on renewable development in the U.S. Estimates of cutting the build-out of new clean power by over 50% as reported by the Rhodium Group to a 17% decrease in solar as reported by Wood Mackenzie. Other reports show an expansion in gas additions as the economics change. In this Special Report, we take a look at drivers of capacity additions in the WECC in the context of load growth and RPS requirements to frame up how the OBBB may impact renewable energy additions in the western states. The OBBB impacts renewable energy tax credits for wind and solar the most by requiring projects to be in service by the end of 2027 or start construction in the next twelve months and be in service ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jul 17, 2025 | |
| The first six months of 2025 has been solar’s time in the sun. Significant investments in solar build-out have been made in markets across the country from West to South Central to East and over the past half of a year those investments are bearing fruit and showing up in a major way on the grid. CAISO got out to an early lead, but ERCOT followed shortly behind, right on its heels. In the past year it has been PJM and MISO that have made strides to enter the race and make up the lost ground to catch up to their neighbors further to the west. Solar growth is one of the key topics covered in our latest Renewable Quarterly report, “Spring into Sunlight”. Figure 1 | Running Maximum Solar Potential Generation (MW) So with the race ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jul 16, 2025 | |
| Last Saturday morning, the AESO grid was expecting wind generation for the day to average around 1.5 GW. Temperatures were warm, above average for the middle of July. Demand was expected to peak at 10.7 GW, down 0.4 GW from the day before, mostly due to lower weekend demand. The figure below is featured in our AESO Supply Demand Dashboard and was published Saturday morning. The net load forecast, calculated by subtracting the solar and wind forecasts from the demand forecast, peaked at 9.2 GW later that evening. This was close to the actual net load level achieved the previous night. Resulting pool prices reached $40/MWh on Friday. Wind on early Saturday morning, however, was already starting to come in under forecast, a foreshadowing of what was to come. Figure 1 | AESO Forecast from ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jul 15, 2025 | |
| In our article titled “SPP-MISO Stack Shuffle”, the spotlight turns to two markets—SPP and MISO—to explore how their supply stacks are evolving. The power sector continues to experience notable changes on both the supply and demand sides. On one hand, the grid is seeing increased integration of renewables and battery storage; on the other, rising demand from data centers and new technologies is pushing electricity consumption higher. As the summer season unfolds—typically the most demanding time of year—market observers are watching closely to see how these shifting dynamics play out. Early summer weather has already tested grid conditions in various regions. While the Midwest and Northeast dealt with an intense heat dome in late June, the South-Central ... » read more | |
| Monday Jul 14, 2025 | |
| Summer is hitting its stride, and not all are equally prepared. Here in the office, some are missing rainy 50-degree days while others are begging for more heat. Some of us have central AC’s, others are opting for a complex system of fans, ice packs, and Hawaiian shirts. Likewise, the energy industry is full of summer preparations. One example is hydro storage. Especially in the West, water is a precious commodity, which becomes scarce in the summer months. This means dams need to carefully manage their supply to be prepared for a long, hot summer. Figure 1 | Grand Coulee Reservoir Storage by Year (feet) Our first figure shows storage, in terms of feet, for Grand Coulee, the largest dam in the Columbia basin. The Pacific Northwest suffered a poor water year. We see this here with ... » read more | |
| Friday Jul 11, 2025 | |
| On June 23, 2025, Governor Kathy Hochul directed the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to add at least 1 GW of nuclear capacity to the State’s electric grid. The details aren’t all there yet, including what, where, when and how much, but for a short moment in time, Governor Hochul’s and President Trump’s policy ambitions align. Recently, we blogged about their ongoing “negotiations” surrounding energy. But to fill out this story a bit more, here is some background and history on New York’s current and demised nuclear power industry and some of its key players. Let’s go back to Long Island in the 1980’s – in the days before Buttafuoco - when the hairdos were big but the bill for electric power was even ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jul 10, 2025 | |
| Written by Joshua Rasmussen Less than one week ago as I accompanied three enthusiastic nephews to a celebratory 4th of July parade in the town of Wallowa in eastern Oregon, I noted the stark difference from the parade conditions one year prior. Each year participants on the parade floats hand out both candy (to delight the children) and bottles of water (to ward off heat stroke for the rest of us). This year the water bottles were scarcely needed as the temperature had failed to rise much above 65 degrees by noon and instead we were wishing we had brought umbrellas to the event after a smattering of rain drops started falling. The Northwest as a whole was in a very un-summerlike lull. Conditions have changed rapidly in the intervening days, with a blast of heat ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jul 9, 2025 | |
| Since the start of the month, SoCal gas has sent out a flurry of notices with updates to their natural gas maintenance schedule, totaling more than one a day so far this July. The work sometimes has little impact on flows, like the recent additions impacting capacity of the Blythe Sub Zone where flows already sit well below capacity. Or the work might have large repercussions, like the work on the North Desert Zone which will last through the rest of the year and most of 2026. The West NG Pipeline Capacity Dashboard from Energy GPS helps make sense of the barrage of notices. The SoCal figure provided shows subscribers where flows are at compared to the most recent available capacities and how those capacities have changed from the previous maintenance schedule. The figure below from ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jul 8, 2025 | |
| ERCOT’s structural demand growth in 2025 has remained strong, though it has eased slightly since the record-setting pace observed earlier in the year, as discussed in out latest special report titled “Looking Forward Towards ERCOT Summer Load”. Building on our earlier weather-normalized methodology, we continue to separate organic demand increases from those driven by weather fluctuations. The latest results show that Q2 structural demand rose 6.4% year-over-year, bringing the 2025 average to 7.3%—a robust rate that reflects accelerating growth compared to recent years. Figure 1 – ERCOT monthly weather-normalized demand Regional breakdowns reveal that demand is becoming more distributed across ERCOT. While the West zone has historically posted the ... » read more | |
| Monday Jul 7, 2025 | |
| The end of last week saw Independence Day, and the passage of the new administration’s cornerstone legislation, the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB). From the perspective of the renewable industry, this new law was a damper on the otherwise festive weekend that will trigger a race to the end or at least through the rest of the term of the current presidency. This is because it makes big changes to the longstanding investment and production credits to the benefit of renewable resources[1]. While the headlines put an end to renewables as we know them, the next few years will be intense given the termination is not immediate as the bill gives until 2027 to enter production. Additionally, it makes an exception for projects that start construction within a year from today, meaning that they can ... » read more | |