Featured Articles
| Wednesday Jul 27, 2016 | |
| Heading into the back half of this month we faced a a known maintenance outage on the Rex pipeline that threatened to push production offline in the Marcellious region. Figure 1| Rex Pipeline Maintenance Announcement The maintenance work began on schedule shutting in nearly 1.6 BCF of production across 5 different points. The maintenance missed its initial return date for Friday and withheld production through the weekend. Figure 2| Rex Marceullus Production 7/17 - 7/26 The delay in production combined with a bullish demand outlook for ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jul 26, 2016 | |
| Under normal circumstances, the natural gas merchant generators in the Desert Southwest dedicate their output towards the Southern California energy markets. That is until they get the proper price incentive to keep the generation east of the Colorado River. Recently, with some of the coal generation activities in Arizona and New Mexico, and the typical summer heat, the Palo Verde Switchyard has had to price itself over the CAISO SP15 energy market to meet the needs of their evening peak because of an unlikely culprit. Typically the coal fleet in the west has been ... » read more | |
| Monday Jul 25, 2016 | |
| Over the past week or so, the country's energy grid has been seeing record net load. In fact, the entire month has been running at a rate higher than what we saw last year during the month of June. Figure 1 | US Net Load - 7 Day Rolling Average This is due to the heat bubble that sat over most of the country all month. California and the Pacific Northwest were the two regions shielded by the heat wave earlier in the month. That all started to change last week as Southern California's load shifted up with Burbank's highs over 100 degrees for a ... » read more | |
| Friday Jul 22, 2016 | |
| The future of batteries in the electricity grid continues to capture our attention at EnergyGPS. Part of the intrigue around our shop is the lack of good, public analysis associated with costs and benefits associated with the deployment of batteries in the power grid. If you plug any number of search terms into Google to find out about batteries on the grid dozens and dozens of results pop up. More than half of the results are some form of battery hype. The publishers of these materials are mostly environmental or tech operations. They discuss the declining cost of ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jul 21, 2016 | |
| On a daily basis, Texas production is hard to quantify as most wells are sitting on intra-state pipelines which are not subject to FERC jurisdiction. In our daily scapes (shown later in this newsletter), we can see some of the points and have a regression model that uplifts the South Central regions total daily production to what we think is going on within the state. The way we calibrate the numbers on a monthly basis is to look at both EIA and the Texas Railroad Commission monthly data. The latter posted new data yesterday and here is what we have ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jul 20, 2016 | |
| The CAISO Day-Ahead auction for today saw a binding constraint (congestion) over path 26 N to S. As far as we can tell, this was an unplanned reduction in capacity on the line as the posted Path 26 capacity rating was unchanged day on day. As a result, the SP15/NP15 day-ahead heavy load spread widened to $6.66 pre-carbon and $5.18 for the energy only component. Figure 1 breaks down the Path 26 congestion by hourly buckets and shows the day on day change. As you can see by the first column flat, the Path 26 constraint was new for today's flow ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jul 19, 2016 | |
| Rockies Express Pipeline will have construction this week as part of the expansion of the Zone 3 delivery capabilities. During this construction several meters will have to be shut down to accommodate the additional tie ins. As per the REX Informational Postings page, the Markwest Seneca meter point is expected to be out of service July 19 - 22. Checking the volumes this morning, we see no drop off in activity. Figure 1 | Rockies Express Meter Posting This outage is expected to start today. We checked the outage listings on the Tallgrass Partners page and ... » read more | |
| Monday Jul 18, 2016 | |
| With the dog days of summer are upon us in most parts of the country starting last week and continuing on into this week. Comparing the recent heat to last year, you can see that the net load is coming in about a week ahead of where things peaked last year. Figure 1 | Net Load for US - 7 Day Rolling Average As load started to march higher over the last two weeks we have see a strong response from the the coal fleet. Last Wednesday's coal generation topped 188 GWs which is is the strongest we have seen all year. Thursday's output looked down but ... » read more | |
| Friday Jul 15, 2016 | |
| Today's newsletter is a continuation from yesterday, where we discussed how the East, Midwest and South were seeing above normal temperatures which have ultimately shifted up overall loads in the specific regions. With that comes higher power burns, with the East leading the charge. Figure 1 | US Power Burns - 7 Day Rolling Average As we stated yesterday, the most recent shift in in the power burns has come with the Pacific Northwest and California markets seeing below normal temperatures since coming out of the long 4th of July weekend. Figure 2 | West Average ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jul 14, 2016 | |
| Over the past couple of weeks, the nuclear fleet has seen some volatility in the units that are offline as we get deeper into summer. As a result, the year on year delta is showing 2.5 GWs more offline for today compared to an year ago. The month to date average is showing just under 3 GWs more offline. From a gas perspective, that equates to roughly .5 BCF/d. Figure 1 | Nuclear Regulatory Commission - Outage Table This, along with above normal temperatures seen across the country (except California and Pacific Northwest), plays into how strong the ... » read more | |