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| Thursday Sep 17, 2015 | |
| One of the main discussions heading into this fall was the anticipation of a high number of nuclear outages. Nuclear units must refuel every 18-24 months and need to come completely offline for weeks at a time in order to do so. Typically, these outages are clustered during the Spring and Fall shoulder months. Last spring saw the lowest nuclear outages in the last five years. As a result, planned outages this spring are expected to hit a 3 year high for the fall. Figure 1 | Forecasted Nuclear Outages (MW) - Daily Over the weekend ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Sep 16, 2015 | |
| With half of September in the books, the heat wave that hit the state of California last weeks continues to feel like a dream as scheduled demand this week has been quite a bit lower. In fact, Burbank even had some precipitation hit the area yesterday morning. Figure 1 | CAISO Load Forecast - Forecast vs Actual From a day-ahead perspective, schedule loads have shifted down over 16,000 MW at the peak and 10,000 MWa across the heavy load hours. Figure 2 | CAISO Day Ahead Scheduled Load Such a shift down only means one thing to the marginal heat rate in the ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Sep 15, 2015 | |
| Over the past couple of weeks, the majority of the continental United States (except for California) has been transitioning from summer like weather to that of fall. This is the usual time of year as the daylight hours are shrinking to a point that the sun is setting around 6:45 pm compared to 9:00 pm. An example of this transition is that of MISO, where the peak load on September 3rd hit 112.8 GW and by the 11th it fell to 81.2 GW. Figure 1 | MISO Actual Load/Wind Profile - Hourly One thing to notice in the graph above, albeit the peak demand has shifted ... » read more | |
| Monday Sep 14, 2015 | |
| With the NFL kicking off its regular season this past weekend, the NFL Ticket package was paid in full once again this season. I have to admit, the sole purpose of the package in our household is so we can watch every Green Bay Packer game live or recorded depending on the kids activities. What I have found out over the years of owning the package is I find myself flipping through the other games as well, not only to see who is beating who but to understand the real weather across the country. For example, at kick off yesterday Chicago was looking at ... » read more | |
| Friday Sep 11, 2015 | |
| As the NFL kicks-off its regular season and football fever begins to take over, I am reminded of that old exercise the 'Up-down'. For those of you fortune enough to have never experienced up-downs, the workout is exactly as it sounds. Players run in place, fall to the ground, then stand up as fast as possible, only to slam to the ground again moments later up a coach's whistle. I mention the up-down because that is the best way to describe the Cali gas market over the last couple of weeks. Hot temperatures in California ... » read more | |
| Thursday Sep 10, 2015 | |
| As temperatures continue to increase across the state, so does the load profile within the CAISO footprint. As of 9:00 am yesterday morning, CAISO revised their peak load forecast by 1,400 MW, with the split evenly across PGAE and SCE's tac region. Looking at the CAISO Day Ahead auction results for today, the schedules load shifted up by 1,400 MWa across the heavy load and just under 1,700 MW at the peak. Figure 1 | CAISO Day-Ahead Scheduled Load - Hourly Looking under the hood, what you saw was PGAE's load increase more than SCE's load while SDGE was basically ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Sep 9, 2015 | |
| Prior to the CAISO Load Forecast report coming out at 9:00 am PST yesterday morning, the cash market was assuming a slight uptick in the overall load and things started out rather strong. This was a result of yesterday's DA results being high due to the load shifting up quite a bit compared to what we were seeing prior to the Labor Day weekend, generation turned off because of the lack of load all last week and the long weekend gas prices being used in the denominator of the implied heat rate. Cash started to drift down after the initial flurry and ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Sep 8, 2015 | |
| Everyone should be back in school by now and college/pro football is going to be get rolling this upcoming weekend. Both are signs we are in September and Fall is right around the corner. This translates into the power demand profile changing to where the peak output shifts down as well as the shape squeezing in due to the daylight hours getting shorter (sunset in Portland is around 7:30 p.m. now, compared to the 8:30 p.m. a couple of weeks ago). Looking at the EnergyGPS Peak Load report, we can see the grid is shifting down considerably over the next 7 ... » read more | |
| Friday Sep 4, 2015 | |
| As temperatures continue to drift down across the state of California, so has the scheduled load within each of the three demand regions. For example, yesterday saw the peak demand shift down 1,900 MW compared to the previous day. As you can see in Figure 1, this put the peak over 7 GW lower compared to Monday and over 12 GW lower than last Friday. Figure 1| CAISO Day Ahead Cleared Demand - Hourly Heavy load As mentioned in yesterday's newsletter, the overall heavy load heat rates have shifted down from the 12.66 lto the 10.22 level during this time ... » read more | |
| Thursday Sep 3, 2015 | |
| As we head into the long holiday weekend, California demand continues to shift down as the entire state is looking at moderate temperatures. Figure 1 | Burbank Temperatures - Actual and Forecast This has led to the overall peak demand to fall over 9,000 MW from where we were a week ago. Most of the decrease is showing up in the Southern part of the state as SCE and SDGE's demand profile has shifted down drastically. Figure 2 | CAISO Peak Load - Actual vs Forecast Such a decline has pushed the SP15 implied heat rates down from the 12.6 level across the heavy ... » read more | |