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| Monday Oct 7, 2024 | |
| California: the magic place where you can go to the beach on a 100+ degree day and by a pumpkin spice latte in the same season. While in other parts of North America people are digging up their winter coats, the Golden State found itself in a second summer. In a season of change Mother Nature decided to deliver more of the same. This brought us right back to the same, tight conditions of the summer gas and power markets. But in the case of the former, second summer was not like the first, with California’s spot gas prices rocketing up to previously unachievable heights. Figure 1 | 2024 Spot Gas Prices by Hub In some ways California’s start to October is very much like the summer before it. Triple digit highs in Sacramento? Check. High gas demand? Check. Good surfing? ... » read more | |
| Friday Oct 4, 2024 | |
| Growing up in the 1970s, a lot of my time and energy was spent riding my bike around to either play baseball, deliver newspapers, or buy comic books. Of the three hobbies, it was baseball really peaked my interest as it was and still is America's pasttime sport. The professional teams of that era were iconic and enduring as players tended to stay with teams for multiple years, and to my opinion, the most dominant of the time was the Cincinnati Reds, aka “The Big Red Machine”, stocked with talent and anchored by baseball’s all-time hit leader Pete Rose, aka “Charlie Hustle”. Pete died this past week, and I was thinking about his approach to baseball, not his indiscretions about gambling, which was to run as fast as he could for ... » read more | |
| Thursday Oct 3, 2024 | |
| With another cycle coming to an end earlier this week, the Pacific Northwest hydro system is looking at another change-over of the calendar as we had the kick-off the 2025 water year on Tuesday, October 1st. It’s a change-over period at Energy GPS as well, as we put together our full monthly hydro forecast for the new water year. Our forecast models flows at 60 dams throughout Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana as combination of starting reservoir elevations, projected dam operations throughout the water year tied to drafting for flow augmentation and flood risk management calculations, and support for salmon populations, migration, and breeding, unregulated water volumes from precipitation and snowpack leading to run-off entering the river system, and key ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Oct 2, 2024 | |
| With the start of October yesterday, shoulder season and the nuclear outages that come with it are firmly upon us. We wrote a report back in August about our expectations for this fall’s nuclear outage season. Based on historical patterns, we looked at fall 2018 as the template for this year’s potential. As nuclear plants go out for refueling every 18 or 24 months, we needed to go back 6 years to find a season when a similar list of plants would be offline for maintenance. Turns out, fall 2018 had a very high number of outages, peaking at 16.8 GW in September and over 24 GW in October. In contrast, the last two fall nuclear seasons peaked under 12 GW in September and just over 21 GW in October. In this blog, we’ll check in on how this outage season is progressing thus ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Oct 1, 2024 | |
| October has arrived, ushering in the autumn season and marking a departure from the long summer days. As the weather shifts, the energy landscape is also subject to change. The extended hours of summer sunlight gradually shorten, and overnight and morning temperatures drop significantly. This period, often referred to as the shoulder season, is a time for maintenance as load decreases from summer's peak levels. Generators are fine-tuned in preparation for the upcoming winter season, and outage activity is now in full swing. Over the past month, the number of offline generators has increased. As illustrated in the graph below, outages in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) have reached just below the 20 GW mark, and we anticipate this figure will rise as October progresses. Figure 1 | SPP ... » read more | |
| Monday Sep 30, 2024 | |
| Prior to the influx of renewables mandated by the State of California, the summer-time peaking load relied on both transmission flows from adjacent balancing regions, base load nuclear and in-state natural gas-fired generators that sat in the LA Basin, the middle portion of the CAISO footprint known as ZP26 and Northern California. Over the past few years, the once common relationship between supply and demand has given way to the influx of renewable energy known as wind, solar and now batteries. There are still moments when the grid relies heavily on the ‘old school’ supply/demand balance as net load delivers a shape that exposes the later afternoon and evening ramp block of hours. Once we transition to lower power demand days, the days of a slow transition ... » read more | |
| Friday Sep 27, 2024 | |
| The figure below shows the daily low and average SP15 RTM prices from January – August 2024. This spring, average daily prices settled at negative numbers on some days while hourly prices reached as low as negative -$103/MWh. Across Q2 2024, the SP15 solar capture ratio (solar-weighted average divided by all-hours simple average) was -40%. These are pretty shocking numbers! Figure 1 | Daily Average SP15 RTM Prices, 2024 As we have discussed in many of our reports, prices reached these low levels for two reasons – (1) grid operations relied on renewable curtailments to balance the system (2) solar projects priced their energy in the CAISO at the negative of the REC value. Turns out there is a bit of a short squeeze occurring in the REC markets with 2024 vintage PCC1 ... » read more | |
| Thursday Sep 26, 2024 | |
| Coming into the summer there were questions all around about how the PJM grid would fare. The expansion of data centers around DC and the growth of crypto facilities threatened to produce further structural load increases in the continuation of the pattern that has been playing out not only in PJM but in other areas around the country. Conversations swirled in PJM’s Reserve Certainty Senior Task Force meetings about the potential shortfalls of the ISO’s reserve requirements with adjustments being made throughout the spring and summer. On the other side of the equation, PJM shared in the explosive growth in installed solar capacity along with the rising renewable market in MISO and continued buildout in the more established CAISO and ERCOT fleets. With ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Sep 25, 2024 | |
| South to North congestion has been a key feature in SP15 and NP15 day-ahead and real-time pricing in the last two weeks. With lowered demand and abundant solar, the midday SP15 prices have sunk below the $0/MWh mark for several days. This is good news for SP15 batteries, which can charge during negative price intervals while still receiving double digit prices for dispatch in the evening ramp. The real-time arbitrage opportunities during these days have been higher, but the timing of the low prices sometimes made it difficult for SP15 batteries to achieve. Building on our previous battery reports about missed charging opportunities, our latest battery report, titled ‘A Swing and a Miss for the CAISO Fleet’, digs deeper into the congestion of last week, as well as the CAISO ... » read more | |
| Monday Sep 23, 2024 | |
| It is hard to believe that we are already looking the last full week of September 2024, which means that it is officially Fall as the seasons changed over the weekend. Mother Nature has displayed fall-like weather across the West for the past 10 days while a little hiccup is on display early in the week before reverting back to the cooler conditions. The modest daytime highs ans cooler overnight lows gave us a glimpse of how the world looks to be turning as we move into October. The midday block of hours is going to display S to N congestion between the two gen hubs in California while the adjacent regions will continue to price themselves accordingly with the Mid-C's marginal cost of energy is the intertie export when wind is modest and then it flips to trading flat to ... » read more | |