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| Tuesday Jun 18, 2024 | |
| The ERCOT grid is incorporating more heat into its daily conversation, but the renewable landscape has a voice given the wind profile is impressive coming out of the weekend. The impact the latter has on the former is detailed in the net load hourly profile where the most valuable block of hours in the evening ramp when the sun is setting. Over the course of the month, we have seen this block of hours average just over 2.0 GWa higher compared to that of June 2023. Figure 1 | ERCOT Renewable 12x24 Profiles This might sound like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, the uptick could not happen at a better time. The reason behind the need for megawatts during this block stems from the power demand still being strong while the sun starts to set, and the solar panel ... » read more | |
| Monday Jun 17, 2024 | |
| Watching the National Basketball Association (NBA) playoffs, the home team that can finish off the series tends to get the crowd chanting ‘MVP, MVP, MVP’ when their star player has the ball. For example, the Dallas Mavericks have Luka Doncic while the Boston Celtics have Jason Tatum as their superstars leading them to the championship series where the Boston fans will have a chance for the cheer to resonate on Monday, June 17th as the Celtic’s are up 3-1 in the series. Figure 1 | National Basketball’s MVP’s We continue to cover the natural gas landscape in the EnergyGPS North American Natural Gas and Power Product Offering as well as deliver a monthly market recap as part the Platinum eCommerce package we offer as part of our blog series. For ... » read more | |
| Friday Jun 14, 2024 | |
| In the West, there are only three nuclear power plants currently operating – Columbia Generating Station (Richland, Washington, ~1200 MWs), Palo Verde Generating Station (Tonopah, Arizona, ~4000 MWs), and Diablo Canyon (Avila Beach, California, ~2300 MWs). All began operation in the mid 80s. The EIA publishes information on hourly generation by fuel type per balancing authority and region. Because there’s only one nuclear plant in the Desert Southwest, the aggregated data for nuclear is entirely Palo Verde (it’s a real regional heavyweight, responsible for about 25% of all generation in the region). The figure below shows annual generation for the Southwest region (WALC, AZPS, GRIF, HGMA, DEAA, SRP, TEPC, PNM and EPE as defined by the EIA) taken ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jun 13, 2024 | |
| The investment in solar capacity continues to show up in ERCOT, with more generation hitting the grid each of the first five months so far in 2024. Tracking a running maximum of solar generation in ERCOT (figure taken from our ERCOT Monthly Renewable Dashboard) shows steady growth over the past three years but the slope has increased since the end of last year. Since May the solar profile has shifted up again, adding 1.3 GW to the average midday peak output. Figure 1 | ERCOT Solar and Wind Running Monthly Maximum Generation (MW) Renewable growth is a little harder to track on a day-to-day basis in ERCOT compared to some other markets as one can only see generation that actually hits the grid, whereas potential generation is not immediately visible. Information on ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jun 12, 2024 | |
| This May came with some intense weather for the state of Texas. Wind and rain caused widespread destruction, as well as multiple power outages. From the power perspective, we covered the events impacting ERCOT in our morning reports and market flashes. More recently, we wrote about how the ERCOT battery fleet fared this May and how just a few days of high prices impacted the monthly averages. Read on for a sneak peek at our most recent battery report, ‘A May Day for ERCOT Batteries’. With one glance at our ERCOT Monthly Battery Dashboard, you’ll notice a lot to celebrate for ERCOT batteries this May. The figure below displays the average buy and sell prices using our TB2 method which assumes batteries are selling in the top 2 priced hours in the day-ahead market and ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Jun 11, 2024 | |
| The California market was riding a little bit of a high note last week with Sacramento tapping triple digits while Southern California saw three straight days of low wind generation as daytime highs in the low/mid 80’s inland. It helped that the Southwest was feeling the heat as both Arizona and Nevada both displayed record temperatures for this time of year. The high note comes in the form of having enough demand to keep the renewable energy space from needing to curtail megawatts to balance the system. Figure 1 | CAISO Potential Renewable Solar and Wind Generation The price action in the day-ahead market took the SP15 negative midday value and pushed it up into the low teens where the heavy load average jumped up as high as $22.02 on the 6th while the bookend dates ... » read more | |
| Monday Jun 10, 2024 | |
| An important but easily overlooked element of Pacific Northwest power and gas markets is constraints on pipeline transport capacity. As the better part of the Pacific Northwest natural gas supply comes from production in British Columbia, an innocuous bit of maintenance can quickly shift the fundamentals. June 3rd through 10th has seen one such event, with a meaningful capacity constraint at Station 4B south. While May rates sat between 1.5 and 1.7 BCF/day, the first part of June has been limited to 1.13. In other words, approximately half a BCF has gone missing. Figure 1: Sumas NG receipts (MCF/day) Figure 1 shows gas receipts at Sumas, where the same pipe crosses the US/Canada border. While no capacity constraint exists at this point, the entire region sits downstream of ... » read more | |
| Friday Jun 7, 2024 | |
| The electricity market chess board has never been this complicated: energy transition, “surging demand”, the need for new transmission, resource adequacy, low hydro, evolving market design. It’s hard to track let alone process all that is unfolding. I had a week of PTO at the end of May. It does a body good to get off the grid, sit in a raft, stare at beautiful scenery, sleep in a tent, drink beer out of a can, and unwind. Since my return, I’ve had a number of interesting things come across my radar. Thinking through how to connect these dots is a challenge. I’ll give it a try. Anytime you can listen to an interview with Jigar Shah who runs DOE’s Loan Program Office (LPO) you should do so. I recently heard him on the “Energy Gang” podcast ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jun 6, 2024 | |
| For many energy markets across the United States where renewables have been adopted as an important portion of the supply stack, the seasonal trends are the opposite of wind’s renewable counterpart of solar energy. That is, whereas the summer approaches and brings more heat and intense solar rays, wind typically peaks during the month of April, then begins to decline over the rest of the spring to bottom out during the summer. Our latest Renewable Monthly Report, “May 2024 – Giving Way to the Sun” discusses how this trend is playing out (and where it is not, namely CAISO) and puts the spotlight onto solar across the country. California solar has been front and center all year, with massive oversupply problems in Southern California providing the ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jun 5, 2024 | |
| It’s the first week of June and the official start to summer is only a few short weeks away. For nuclear plants across the country, this means outage season is wrapping up as plants prepare to offer baseload energy during the high-demand summer months. The drop-off in nuclear outages over the last several weeks has been drastic, as shown in our Daily NRC Nuclear Plant Summary Dashboard. Earlier in the spring, many plants were offline for refueling and outages peaked over 20 GW in April. By the middle of May this number dropped under 13 GW. In the first few days of June, the total number of outages was under 2 GW and now sits around 3 GW. Only two plants are still ramping back online after refueling while over 25 plants completed their maintenance and are back online from refueling ... » read more | |