Good Afternoon,

The NWRFC is up to more shenanigans, again. This week, after taking the butcher knife to last week’s forecast, they found new water (where? it didn’t rain last week if anything more snow melted then expected) and Ansergy’s energy equivalents rallied hard from July and out. Let’s look …

Monthly

Energy Scorecard

• June – down 150 aMW, call it rounding error
• July – up 1800 aMW – whoa
• August – up 500 aMW
• Sept – up 340 aMW

We always thought last week was a bit violent, so maybe this is just a correction to that over-exuberant outlook. Our exact quote from last week was “We might suggest, or at least point out, that some of the cuts have been irrationally exuberant and probably they cut too deep. Now the Federales are projecting WY17 to be 2000 aMW of EE below normal. Oops, let’s all chant “whipsaw” at the same time.”

Daily

The pain (if you’re long AND you believe in the STP) comes in the middle of July, nearly every other day of the forecast is identical to last week.

Year on Year

Let’s try to put the current forecast in perspective by comparing same week to previous years:

The mud isn’t any clearer. September is now projected to be the biggest of the last five water years, while Jul and Aug are equal to 2014. Perhaps SWE can help explain thes #s?

Using our weighted composite for Mid-C we see that WY17 is slightly lower than WY14, but for Montana, it is about 5% lower. The only set of basins higher are the Snake, and the MidC is biased by large west-side anomalies. Compare WY17 to WY11, a truly monstrous water year. At best, WY17 is slightly above normal. If May had come in cooler than normal, we could see a case for deferred melt that would impact July, but May was warm, not cold.

C’est la vie in the WECC, especially so in the Wild Wild MidC.