Good Morning,
This blogger is a bit under the weather (flu) so today’s will be short, perhaps not sweet, depends on your perspective. For starters, let’s examine the market (ISO):
Remarkable by how unremarkable it is. We’d expected some fireworks. Instead, we got a few smoldering briquettes. Why? Loads went nowhere; gas took a dump, BPA filled the rivers, and the Mid-C bogarted its energy.
Monday was never meant to be the cold day, plus it was a pseudo holiday, but still, it was the start of the “cold snap” and wasn’t to snappy load or price-wise.
The bottom line is it just wasn’t that cold in the load centers; Portland was four degrees warmer than a week ago; Sacto was up an off the charts thirteen degrees. But the big cold comes this week, right? Right? Let’s see about that:
The Interior looks inferior; a smattering of below normal but not much.
California flirts with one day below normal, and it’s later in the week.
But the Mid-C saves the day, it’s chilly and then back to normal by week’s end; no hints of this pushing into week two.
In fact, the ten-day composites are all above normal except at the Mid-C; in other words, its do or die for Q1 length. Either cash goes nuts, or these Jan-Feb prices are nuts…me thinks the latter.
ZP exports are up 1300 MW; this offsets some of the cuts from the MidC that you’ll see in the plots below:
Powerex remained a diligent seller all weekend long, their averages yesterday almost equaled the seven-day average.
Both the AC and DC cut way back on the 1st, for just an hour or two, but after that, it was business as usual.
Conclusions
We bought into the hype of cold; we were long the Jan at the Mid-C, but now we see no reason to keep length when cash is so lame.
That is an ugly chart (Jan) for length; we are selling all of it, short.
Sorry for the short post, gotta go barf again.
mike