Featured Articles
| Tuesday Mar 15, 2016 | |
| With all the precipitation hitting Northern California over the past couple of weeks, Sunday/Monday culminated into Shasta seeing its highest inflows since 2005. Figure 1 | Northern California Hydro Dam Flows - Daily As you can see in Figure 1, yesterday topped the 77 kcfs mark, which is over double what we saw last week and 17 kcfs more than Saturday. What you also see is the outflows at Shasta still have not changed as they are still storing as much water as they can. This is reflected in the daily elevation levels posted. Figure 2 | Shasta ... » read more | |
| Monday Mar 14, 2016 | |
| The last couple of weeks have been a very exciting time for energy policy in the Northwest. The enviros have much to celebrate. First the Oregon pro-RPS, anti-coal legislation was signed into law by Governor Kate Brown. Then on Friday the FERC issued an order denying the Jordan Cove Energy Project’s application under section 3 of the Natural Gas Act and Parts 153 and 380 of the Commission’s regulations to site, construct, and operate a LNG export terminal in Coos Bay Oregon. The FERC order makes for interesting reading. There were two applications in front ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 11, 2016 | |
| EGPS Newsletter | NOAA Recap NOAA released their winter assessment on Tuesday confirming that this winter was the warmest on record for the lower 48 states. Figure 1 | Dec 2015 – Feb 2016 Temperature Departures from Average You can see in Figure 1, there was not a single state that posted an average temperature below climatology normals between December and February. At the beginning of the winter season, there was all this talk of a strong El Nino pattern that would continue to influence weather events. This forward view was on the heals of ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 10, 2016 | |
| With another set of storms moving through the Pacific Northwest starting today and the overnight lows inching upward, the region is going to see its supply/demand picture shift quite a bit in the coming days. First, load shifts down come the weekend and with daylight savings on the docket for Sunday early AM, the load profile will continue to swing lower during the evening ramp as the daytime hours will get longer. Figure 1 | BPA Load and Wind Profile - Hourly Second, the wind generation is going to be volatile with the storms. As you can see in Figure 1 ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 9, 2016 | |
| As we move towards the end of March we approach a turning point in the natural gas supply and demand equation as storage facilities switch from withdrawing gas and begin to inject. Typically we see the turnaround happen close to April 1st. Currently, this year is on track to do just that, however looking at the fundamentals it is entirely possible that the storage curve may flatten before then end of the month. Figure 1| US Natural Gas Storage Levels - YoY April 1st coincides with the end of winter and a decrease ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Mar 8, 2016 | |
| Yesterday, the EIA released the monthly Drilling Productivity Report (DPR). In the words of the EIA, this report: "uses recent data on the total number of drilling rigs in operation along with estimates of drilling productivity and estimated changes in production from existing oil and natural gas wells to provide estimated changes in oil and natural gas production for seven key regions". The report estimates regional production for the current and next month for each of the basins. The latest update had a surprise in store for any expecting low prices ... » read more | |
| Monday Mar 7, 2016 | |
| In the final days of the 2016 legislative session, the Oregon House and Senate passed Senate Bill 1547 which makes sweeping changes to Oregon’s renewable energy policy. Governor Kate Brown is expected to sign the bill into law in the coming weeks. This legislation will stimulate the development of incremental renewable resources in Oregon and surrounding states. By and large, it seems like a reasonably thought through piece of legislation that will bring additional renewable energy to Oregon within certain cost containment parameters. Having said that, the 19 ... » read more | |
| Friday Mar 4, 2016 | |
| As per the notice on the Tallgrass website yesterday (Thursday). The Rockies Express production that was knocked out due to Tuesdays force majeure has started to return. All indications are that the 1 BCF/d of production should show up in tonight's evening cycle. Figure 1 | REX East Receipts - Daily When the outage occurred, REX increased the capacity of the Markwest receipt from 685 MDth/d to 725 MDth/d. Expect the capacity at this point to go back down to the original rating. The intended design of the point is only 600 MDth/d. The return of the ... » read more | |
| Thursday Mar 3, 2016 | |
| The Pacific Northwest is bracing itself for some more precipitation over the next 10 days. It is cold enough for the precipitation to be in the form of snow in the middle to upper elevation levels but the lower elevation will see plenty of rain. Figure 1 | National Weather Service - Pacific Northwest Precipitation Pattern This precipitation pattern has increased the overall MAF 6.3 for the Jan-July time period at The Dalles, with the most recent uptick being 1 full MAF (the previous report increased by 5.3 MAF) Figure 2 | NWRFC ESP Report - The Dalles As you ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Mar 2, 2016 | |
| For the last two days the day ahead price of power in Buffalo NY as average $10 above the price of power in NYC for the on peak average. To understand why Buffalo NY has higher power prices then the largest city in United States we need to go back a little ways. In September 2012 NRG retired two 185 MW coal units at the Dunkirk plant in Western NY. The retirement of the units has created reliability issues for Western NY power grid ever since. In summary, the transmission grid in Western NY is a delicate balance between the 345 KV and 230 KV ... » read more | |
View more [
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95 96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
]