Featured Articles
| Friday Oct 9, 2015 | |
| As the heat in Southern California continues to rise, so does the scheduled load and virtual demand in the day-ahead market. Such an increase could be seen for tomorrow as the grid was shorter by 1,800 MWa (3,000 MW at the peak) on the load schedules and 900 MWa shorter via the virtual behavior. This left the grid over 2,700 MWa shorter across the heavy load and over 4,000 MW shorter during the peak hour. Figure 1 | CAISO Day-Ahead Load Schedules To try and soften the blow to the overall implied heat rates, the CAISO made a call to 'suspend' the Round ... » read more | |
| Thursday Oct 8, 2015 | |
| California continues to see heat throughout the state, especially in south where Burbank is expected to see highs in the triple digits on Friday and upper 90's over the weekend. Figure 1 | Burbank Forecast and Actual Temperatures This has let to the CAISO Day-Ahead load schedules to shift higher throughout the week, especially during the evening ramp where the peak has gone from 30.3 GW to 34 GW as of today. Figure 2 | CAISO Day-Ahead Load Schedules Add to it the shift in virtuals to net demand, especially in the evening ramp hours and the grid is quite a bit ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Oct 7, 2015 | |
| As we roll into the 2nd weekend of October, the high ridge that has blessed the West with above normal temperatures does not want to go away as California is looking at highs in the upper 90's once again on Friday and into the weekend. This will translate into increased demand across the state. Figure 1 | CAISO Peak Demand Forecast As you can see in Figure 1, the peak demand hits on Friday (this week) does not shift down the load over the weekend and looks to stick around into early next week. Now someone might say by looking at the picture above, the ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Oct 6, 2015 | |
| Over the past few days, the weather has been mild across the country, which in turn has decreased the demand for natural gas from a power burn perspective and forced more gas into storage. Let's first look at how power burns are shaping up now that we are into the first full week of October. Monday's total US burns were around 23.6 BCF, which is over 4 BCF lower than a week ago. Figure 1 | US Power Burns - Daily If you look at the year on year (YOY) delta to the far right column in Figure 1, you can see the delta is less than 1 BCF. This is ... » read more | |
| Monday Oct 5, 2015 | |
| Over the weekend, the California grid saw some changes to their supply stack that ultimately pushed up the overall implied heat rate in SP15 by a 1 1/4 points (going from a 10.75 on Friday to over a 12.0 for today). Figure 1 | CAISO Day Ahead LMP Auction Results - SP15 Hourly As you can see in Figure 1, the entire curve shifted up despite load being 2,800 MWa lower today vs. Friday. Figure 2 | CAISO Day Ahead Load Schedules - Hourly Since it is not load causing the uptick in the implied heat rate, it has be coming from the supply side. Diving into ... » read more | |
| Friday Oct 2, 2015 | |
| Now that we are in the month of October, the well anticipated derate of the DC transmission line from the Pacific Northwest down to Southern California is upon us. As of tomorrow, October 3rd HE 5, the DC intertie will be derated down to 0 MW. It is expected to stay derated until the work is completed on December 21st, 2015. This information has been known in the marketplace for some time as BPA as had conference calls/sent out PDF reports that describe the work going on and how the changes will ultimately add new capacity to the line as well as make ... » read more | |
| Thursday Oct 1, 2015 | |
| Technically, Fall starts on the 23rd of September but those of you who live on the west coast know that fall weather has been a little bit late this year due to the high ridge that will not go away. This has been the most evident down in California, where up until this week, the loads have been well above normal (last Friday's peak load forecast was just above 42,500 MW). Figure 1| CAISO YoY load - HL The unseasonable uptick in load was complicated by scheduled derates over the Paci interface and weak wind generation. The loss of imports and weak ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Sep 30, 2015 | |
| Over the years, we have discussed the CAISO market in detail. One of the topics that comes to the forefront is the Ancillary Service markets, especially the Regulation Up and Spin markets as they tend to show binding constraints between what is known as SP26 (LA Basin) and the rest of the CAISO footprint. Today was one of those days, as the grid got longer day on day and the Regulation Up binding constraint widened. Figure 1 | CAISO Regulation Up Binding Constraint - Hourly The blue line is the price for Regulation Up across the state while the ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Sep 29, 2015 | |
| Now that October is getting close, both ERCOT and CAISO (yesterday's Newsletter) seem to be onboard with the fact that the power load across the country will continue to decline. This, in turn, will have an impact on the overall power burns across the country. This is evident in the recent power burns, as the weekend dipped down below 25 BCF. For Monday, things ticked up (25.8 BCF), but nowhere near the levels we saw a week ago (27.5 BCF). Figure 1 | North American Power Burns - Daily Such a shift down has prompted the month to date average for ... » read more | |
| Monday Sep 28, 2015 | |
| With October right around the corner, it looks like both ERCOT and California are finally going to join the rest of the country's move down peak power demand over the past week. Up to this point, California has been looking at above normal temperatures throughout the month with Burbank seeing upper 90's as a high last week. Figure 1 | Burbank Forecast/Actual Temperatures This led to the overall CAISO peak demand to shift up to the 42,600 MW level, with both SCE and SDGE being the key drivers. Figure 2 | CAISO Peak Load Forecast As you can see in Figure 2 ... » read more | |