Good Morning,
The spring is coiled, its tension tight, ready to explode a direction … up or down? Loadwise – down, waterwise – down, outagewise – up. Plenty of conflicting signals, but let’s wade through a few of them then draw our conclusions.
Demand
The northwest will grow much warmer next week and will be a good test to see what happens when 1) it sheds load; 2) melts low-level snow; both are bearish, but more on the latter in the hydro piece.
California is remarkable for how unremarkable it is; a child with a color crayon would struggle to draw the forecast tighter to climatology than did today’s forecast. It’s nowhere now and will be nowhere for the foreseeable future.
The interior is warm now but grows cold by month’s end; this warming trend has changed the transmission flows in that region:
Mostly the Great Basin, it’s now exporting to Palo where it was buying last week and so is the Rockies. With new cooling on the horizon flows should revert to winter normals.
Loads are mostly sideways, except at Palo where they continue to slide into the abyss; but that should change with some 80 degree weather over the weekend and spilling into next week. Phoenix is not as warm as it was on Monday (the 10 day outlook) but still above normal. Be a good test this weekend to see what 85 degrees does to the HE17 peak.
Hydro
We just have to lead with the RFC’s 10 day as it has become quite jumpy. Monday’s STP was moved to the trashbin with yesterday’s forecast; check out the 2000 aMW delta for Thursday vs the STP, but then the govt which giveth taketh away and backs its numbers way down, yet all those numbers remain above Monday’s 120 day outlook.
The COE will release its Feb flood control today and if the past is any indicator of the future the draft should be in the 1240s, perhaps even into the 30’s.
The number should be close to the 97’s posted Mon-Tues; we already showed Monday what drafts that volume drove in past years. First, let’s see what impact March may have by the draft:
In several years there was no draft from current forebay of 1282; you’d need a 99% TDA water supply to pull the reservoir below 1270. How about Mid-April?
A modest draft, for some years it would still only be five feet from todday; now for the …drumroll … end of April:
In those two weeks twenty feet of water is pulled, for some years, but look at the most recent (2015-16), they only walked the forebay down to 1250; both of those years, by the way, were drum gate years.
All of which suggests to us that the only way to crush February will be natural river flows; there is plenty of low-level snow to melt but we don’t see the rapid warm up that will trigger a large freshet, though those flows are already picking up steam:
Lower right, Side Flows, are starting to surge and have such a long way to go once it does warmup. Also take note of California, those may be season high flows, and the Willamette is out of control at 77kcfs. But the Pend Oreille and Columbia at Int Border are off speaking to BPA’s ability to manage natural river flows. Unless there is rapid melt the Feds have the ability to just cut discharge and capture inflows in the reservoir. We just don’t see the cataclysmic Feb meltdown.
In fact, after working our way through this current storm system, one we’ve been hyping for the last 15 days, there isn’t much left on the horizon; not much at all. Like bone dry for the balance of the month. Clear as mud, huh?
TransGen
Gas outages inside the ISO have surged over the last couple of days; most of it forced outage, though, suggesting that there should be a surge of planned coming soon.
Lots of new gas units tripped since Monday, and not many returned:
Northwest gas noms are still strong and Palo’s are in the crapper, as are the Great Basin’s after the warmup; Kally’s rallied a touch off of those outages.
The AC continues to be uder-utilized and Powerex took the ball and went home, then even brought some energy with them. ZP is selling its guts out to NP and the DC is just doing it what it always does – puking energy into Sylmar.
We mentioned earlier how the warm up in the Great Basin shook up flows within that region, but check out how exports out of Palo and into CA have taken off – effectively moving that GB largesse into the golden state. Though we find it quite strange to see flows into GB from there; huh? Must be LDWP.
Conclusions
- Feb
- Ugly charts, especially at Mid-C where we are long; we just don’t see the risk in carrying length here, not given a drying trend and perhaps a slight cooling. We will, however, hedge out some of that Mid-C HL length by putting on the Texas Hedge:
- Long MidC LL
- Ugly charts, especially at Mid-C where we are long; we just don’t see the risk in carrying length here, not given a drying trend and perhaps a slight cooling. We will, however, hedge out some of that Mid-C HL length by putting on the Texas Hedge:
- Mar
- Even uglier, and with all plots now at 90 day lows (gas is 90 day low, too) we’d be comfortable long everywhere
- SP – long the on
- MidC – long the LL for size; the northwest is drying, perhaps cooling, and the draft won’t have any effect on river operations, at least at Coulee. our biggest fear here is an early melt but we see no signs of the warm weather need for that
- Even uglier, and with all plots now at 90 day lows (gas is 90 day low, too) we’d be comfortable long everywhere
- Apr
- We wouldn’t be surprised to see California with less water in April than today but are pretty sure the MidC will have more via the Coulee draft and the inevitable first freshet driven off of low-level snow melt.
- SP – Long
- MidC – short
- We wouldn’t be surprised to see California with less water in April than today but are pretty sure the MidC will have more via the Coulee draft and the inevitable first freshet driven off of low-level snow melt.