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| Monday Oct 21, 2024 | |
| Halloween is just around the corner, as signaled by the giant skeletons appearing on front lawns and bulk bags of candy crowding grocery store shelves. Everyone knows we are close to the event of the season, in terms of candy consumption. But now, candy storage is at a high, and tricker treaters don’t even have their costumes together yet. Trade out candy for natural gas, and Halloween for Winter and you have the situation in West gas markets. Everyone knows the cold is near, but that does not do much good when most of California can go to dinner in a T-Shirt. The massive quantities of gas sitting in storage caverns mean that there’s no critical need to inject gas, just as there’s no critical need to run to the convenience store for a Snickers. Figure 1 | Regional Daily ... » read more | |
| Friday Oct 18, 2024 | |
| There are many ways to describe a set of numbers: max, min, average, sum, median, mode, variance, standard deviation, etc. Each tells us something but doesn’t always describe the whole picture. As we look at wind generation in ERCOT over the next few days, we focus on one metric: the daily average (flat). A substantial amount of wind is in the forecast for ERCOT for the end of this week, with Friday October 18th expecting a daily average that is well above the norm for this time of year. In Figure 1 below, taken on 10/17/24 from the EPGS ERCOT Real-Time Dashboard, the dark blue line shows actual hourly wind generation, and the light blue line is the forecast. Shown as a grey horizontal line, a daily average wind generation of 23.0 GW ... » read more | |
| Thursday Oct 17, 2024 | |
| Last week saw the final piece of information made available to look at how the renewable scene played out in ERCOT over the past summer. Always on a delay to be posted all at once for the prior month, last week ERCOT’s solar and wind curtailment numbers for September were posted to round out the Q3 period. This is one of the markets focused on in our latest Renewable Quarterly report, “Q3 2024: Solar Wows for the Summer”. Fears were sparked heading into the summer based on the expectation for structural load growth to leave ERCOT facing new highs in summer demand. This was the case last summer, when the structural changes tied to new data centers and cryptocurrency facilities combined with a warm August to push prices to their highest levels seen ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Oct 16, 2024 | |
| Last week was big for the largest battery fleets in the country. Both the CAISO and ERCOT battery fleets reached new peak dispatch levels last Monday, October 7th. For CAISO, the new maximum output is 8.4 GW while ERCOT’s fleet development remains a few years behind. The ERCOT fleet peaked at 4.0 GW. For both, the new records just barely surpassed the old ones, moving up around 100 MW. The figure below displays each fleet’s running maximum output for 2024. This time of year, dispatch growth tends to be more stagnant while the spring and summer typically offer more capacity growth and times of scarcity that lead to broken dispatch records. In our latest battery report, titled ‘New Peaks for Battery Fleets’, we checked in on the growing capacity levels for both ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Oct 15, 2024 | |
| Typically, the month of October is the time when the weather changes, with the transition from summer conditions to autumn cooler temperatures. However, it has not been the case across the Southwest Power Pool region as Mother nature delivered some heat during the first half of this month (October). We see that in the matrix below which displays the cooling degree days (CDDs), by showing the difference from the normal conditions, with the red color indicating much above normal conditions and purple showing the opposite. Except for the two days of October where we observed below normal conditions, the month of October has been unusually warm. Figure 1 | South SPP CDD – Departure from Normal As a result, the energy demand has been strong this month, much higher than the levels ... » read more | |
| Monday Oct 14, 2024 | |
| October arrived with a bang to the West’s natural gas markets. In recent blogs we have already covered the shifts in energy market fundamentals which drove up October pricing, where unseasonal heat overlapped with the start of outage season. Last week upped the ante as that tightness translated to price spikes. The critical factor was congestion, as California’s north became an island, unable to draw in MWs from surrounding regions while Sacramento scorched. Figure 1 | CAISO Day Ahead Transmission Market by Region The table above shows the regional LMP and cost of congestion across CAISO regions. The standout feature is the elevated prices in NP15/PGAE compared to their southern neighbors. California does not publish transmission data from their critical path 15 and path 26 ... » read more | |
| Friday Oct 11, 2024 | |
| We may be approaching the end of the Washington Cap and Invest Program. In just a few weeks, residents of the Evergreen State will be casting votes to either repeal or keep the Program. It could be the end of a Program that we have referred to as a Wild Roller Coaster ride with huge price swings driven by policy rather than fundamentals. From a pricing perspective, there are three ways the program can go from here. First, if the program is repealed carbon prices will no longer exist in Washington. Second, if the program is not repealed it may link with the California\Quebec market. In this outcome it is likely that the carbon price will settle at a price near the current California carbon price because of the relative size of each market. Finally ... » read more | |
| Thursday Oct 10, 2024 | |
| The month of October is displaying some extreme weather events starting with Hurricane Helene and Milton and ending with the above normal temperatures seen across the Westcoast states. In between the two are daytime highs in the low 80’s in the Upper Midwest while the South Central is holding its power demand profile while the wind is fluctuating. Figure 1 | Impact of Hurricanes and/or Tornados Starting with the hurricanes mentioned, the devastation around the two storms is massive as Helene stretched into part of the country that were once deemed safe from catastrophic events that make landfall along the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic Ocean coastline. Milton made landfall yesterday evening so the daylight hours will start to show the damage created by the category 3 ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Oct 9, 2024 | |
| With the month of September, comes the start of fall sports. NFL games take priority on the TV while nearby parks become crowded during local soccer practice and games. In our latest monthly report, we use the metaphor of showcase events, where club teams travel across the country to play in front of coaches for universities and pro teams, to explain the events in the energy space of the past month. Read on for a sneak peak of ‘September Showcase’. Figure 1 | Showcase Events Starting with the result of the September Energy Showcase, the graph below delivers the storyline on the natural gas front as the month started with the prompt month contract holding down the fort just under $2.00 with the first few days in the month pushing it higher by $0.20 ($2.10). After a week ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Oct 8, 2024 | |
| The first week of SPP was remarkable as mother nature delivered some late summer heat, driving energy demand up. From the first pane in the graph below, we have real-time and forecast load with the former represented by the shaded area and the latter in the form of a line, which applies to the other panes in this graph for real-time and forecast values. Load was elevated during this period, especially between 10/3 and 10/5, peaking at 40 GW. On the supply side, the wind generation was decent, with a couple of days with robust generation, notably on 10/2, 10/3, 10/5, which led to curtailments as, seen in the third pane from the top. As a result, net load was low, averaging in the low double digits on high wind days, as indicated in purple in the graph below. Figure 1 | SPP Daily ... » read more | |