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| Thursday Mar 13, 2025 | |
| Tariffs and trade wars have dominated the news cycle for much of the past two weeks, kicked into high gear upon the announcement of new taxes on imports from Canada and Mexico, including a 25% charge on many goods and 10% on trades tied to the energy space. Since then the talk among market participants has been rife with uncertainty given the back-and-forth between the Trump administration and the US’s international trading partners—each day new announcements coming of exemptions to a new set of goods or delays pushing back some of the tariffs until later in the spring. We also saw Canada announce retaliatory taxes in response, including Ontario announcing a 25% surcharge on electricity flows into the US earlier this week on Monday, only to backtrack hours ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 12, 2025 | |
| The ERCOT battery fleet is close to a breakthrough as the fleet attempts to cross the 5.0 GW dispatch record for the first time. The figure below is featured in our ERCOT daily battery dashboard. The blue represents charge from the ERCOT battery fleet while the orange represents discharge. The red is real-time hub price. We’ve covered the transition of the ERCOT fleet from mostly participating in the ancillary service market to attempting to capture day-ahead and real-time arbitrage in the last couple of years. The echoing of the real-time price shape in the discharge pattern shows how far the fleet has come in entering the day-ahead and real-time markets, as higher prices result in higher dispatch from the fleet. Last Wednesday and this Monday both saw triple-digit pricing in ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 11, 2025 | |
| There is a lot going on in the energy space these days as the power sector continues to push the renewable transition while integrating structural load growth tied to the artificial intelligence movement. On the natural gas side of the equation, the political arena around tariffs is front and center while the Russia/Ukraine negotiations are made for television while the two countries continue to battle on the front line. The colder Q1-2025 made a dent in the gas storage volume to which the natural gas forward curve has moved up as a price signal for production is needed. On Friday, we published the EnergyGPS weekly roundup highlighting the products available to clients, exploring what is happening in the consulting world and offering links to current content delivered. We ... » read more | |
| Monday Mar 10, 2025 | |
| Dinah Washington’s 1959 song, “What a Difference a Day Makes” opens with the lines “24 little hours, Brought the sun and the flowers”. Since then, the phrase has come tor present the unpredictable nature of life, with lows and highs often close together. In the CAISO’s grid last week, 24 little hours took away the sun and the flowers. The chart below shows the ISO’s generation stack by resource and hour, and the difference one day can make. Figure 1 | CAISO Generation Stack, March 4th & 5th Of note in the figure above are solar generation (yellow), thermal generation (red) and SP15’s real time LMP (light blue). Between the daylight hours of the 4th and 5th, clouds streamed in off the Pacific to cover most of the state. This more than ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 7, 2025 | |
| If you lived or were growing up in the greater New York Metropolitan region anytime during the 1970s and 80s, you might have known this guy in Figure 1. His name was Jerry Carroll, an actor better known as the television pitchman for Crazy Eddie, a regional consumer electronics chain. Jerry, and the company, was best known for its television ads in the Tri-State region for two decades with the tagline “Crazy Eddie’s Prices Are Insane!” And the last word was pronounced “INSAAAAANNNE!” Jerry was so into the part, so absolutely unhinged in his pitches, that most people thought he was Crazy Eddie, because in his commercials, he really came across as pretty nuts, or at least consuming large amounts of drugs. Turns out he ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 6, 2025 | |
| In a country full of markets racing to add solar capacity the fastest, MISO is perhaps the most impressive. Solar output is increasing rapidly and reached new highs this past month. We took a look at MISO’s growth (along with other markets across the country) in our latest Renewable Monthly report. Looking at the February hourly profile in the figure below, the midday peak surged to just under 7 GW, surpassing the previous high month from five months ago in October by 400 MW. Last year we saw an increase between February generation and August generation of 87% (and a 67% increase over the same period in 2023) for solar. If we see a similar rise in 2025, we could be looking at over 13 GW of midday peak solar by August (or 11.7 GW using 2023 growth ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 5, 2025 | |
| Most of the country will be springing forward this Sunday, changing their clocks and losing out on an hour of sleep. California, however, has gotten a head start to the spring trends. We’ve been covering the low net loads and low prices for both SP15 and NP15 in our most recent CAISO market flashes, as well as rising curtailments in a recent article. All of these are commonplace in the spring, but the Golden State sprang forward early this year as February looked like the new March. In our latest battery report, we explored how this February’s negative prices impacted the CAISO battery fleet. Read on for a sneak peek. Last spring, both DAM and RTM midday prices in SP15 started routinely dropping into deeply negative territory, with prices falling much lower than we had seen in ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 4, 2025 | |
| The winter of 2025 has unleashed a series of intense cold spells, with February delivering one of the season’s most brutal surges across the Lower 48 and Canada—driving significant market shifts explored in our latest monthly report. January saw record-high heating degree day (HDD) accumulation, driving up power and natural gas demand and leading to significant storage withdrawals. February continued the trend, with colder-than-normal conditions impacting regions east of the Rockies, pushing natural gas prices above $4.00 and sustaining that level through bid-week. The demand profile saw fluctuations across the country, with the Upper Midwest experiencing modest price increases and bottlenecks emerging in the Northeast due to infrastructure limitations. Figure 1 | Month HDD ... » read more | |
| Monday Mar 3, 2025 | |
| The renewable penetration within the Golden State continues to have an impact on the natural gas space. In the current gas year, CAISO has consistently produced less of its electricity through thermal generation as in-state solar and battery generation increase. The chart below shows the thermal component of the generation stack, as reported by CAISO. The current year (in blue) has come under the previous two for almost four straight months. Spring has always been a rough season for natural gas plants, with low electricity demand and strong river flows, but this year looks to set a new low bar. Figure 1 | CAISO Thermal 7 Day Average (MWa) To help us understand this change, let’s turn to the figure below. Here, we plot hourly CAISO generation data for a handful of recent ... » read more | |
| Friday Feb 28, 2025 | |
| The Washington Cap-and-Invest Program is now in its third compliance year, over half way through the first compliance period of 2023-2026. The emission cap for the program is shown below with a cap of 49 MMT of carbon in 2026, the final year of the first compliance period. Figure 1 | WA Cap-and-Invest Emission Cap We have been forecasting carbon emissions in Washington State since the start of the program and recently published our latest emission forecast in a Washington Carbon Market Flash titled “February 2025 Mark”. In this forecast, we estimate monthly emissions for 2025 and annual emissions for 2026 along with reported emissions for 2023 from Ecology and our estimated emissions for 2024. Emissions are reported for each major category covered by ... » read more | |