Good Morning,
First a bit of housekeeping: Summer Blogging Schedule.
- Monday Morning – Mike’s Market Recap
- Monday Afternoon – Bill’s STP Report
- Tuesday Afternoon – Bill’s Market Recap
- Wednesday Morning – Mike’s Market Recap
- Thursday Afternoon – Bill’s Market Recap
- Friday – No Commentary
This schedule will continue through Labor Day; then we will return to a Friday Update. I will be out of the office all Friday’s for the remainder of the Summer, though the rest of the staff will be available for customer support.
Final note, I will be in Europe from June 24 to July 10. I expect to get out a few blogs, and Bill will fill in on those days I miss.
Real Time Summaries
We like these new reports because they are comprehensive and current. We made a few summaries by hub that we’d like to share:
SP15
Palo Verde
Note the big change in TTC on the Palo line.
NP15
It’s easy to mix and match unique hub fundies with these real-time objects. Each summary has a combination of generation, demand, hydro, and transmission.
Mid-C 
We added three more lines to the MidC real-time yesterday:
We recommend using this report for monitoring the Northern Intertie flows as it is using 5-minute updates.
South of Custer and North of Echo Lake measure flows into and out of the Puget Sound load center. We won’t presume to be able to tell you what those plots mean, but your real-time desks should, probably do. There is some serious transmission volatility here, and like the Northern Intertie, these plots are updated every five minutes on the BPA site and refreshed each hour on ours.
Demand
Northwest temperatures fell off a cliff, and now the load centers are mired in below normal all the while the hub is buried in hydro energy. Ugly, even butt ugly. There is a respite to climo beyond late next week, but so what? Until we see some high 90s in Portland the only saving grace for MidC is BPA market manipulation – in other words, fundies be damned, long aint wrong as long as Captain Hazelwood is at the helm of the good ship BPA.
Now California has something interesting developing, as in a major weather reversal: 23-degree rally in Burbank and 30 at Sacto. You will just need to suffer through these torturous low loads for the next five days, then the Golden State may return gold until then it is just the Iron Pyrite State.
Here we go, Phoenix is posting some sick hot days out ten days; like 115 for highs, a break the bank day as for reserves and those days also correspond to Kalistani Heat. Interesting …
Loads are interesting only because last year was so high, this year is dwarfing 2016’s lofty levels, but we suspect those lines will reverse in ten days.
We call this the Mexican flag table – blue for cold, red for hot, green for not.
Hydro
Love to lead with our Portland friend’s numbers, they always have something new to say. Today they are saying “BUY” as they slash their own forecasts. We concur, read our Wednesday STP comments – Monday’s STP was too bearish, and we see this as confirmation of that sentiment and suggests a possible volatile 120-day forecast for next week. Volatile at least on the backend since snow seems to be melting away …
In past weeks we highlighted the stations that were low, we’d have a messy looking table if we did that today, now we just highlight those with more than ten inches of SWE, and it’s a pretty clean, right? Also, note that we tweaked this dashboard by merging current with historical. The top group is year on year comparison as of yesterday, and the bottom compares WY 17 against the recent past. The bottom line is the snow is slip sliding away.
California flows have only a single station at five-year highs, all the others are either slightly below the high or at normal. More telling, three of the above are intra-day shaping.
Like California, the Ansergy side flow indexes are coming off; now the Lower Snake is almost below normal. That shouldn’t come as a surprise given that the Salmon SWE is down to a few inches. That’s the good news, the bad news is …
Inflows to Roosevelt continue to drift up and are a crazy 250 kcfs which makes it easy for BPA to meet its refill targets but not its “price” goals. Coulee is a generating machine:
And will remain so until those inflows fall away, but we’re seeing some of that happening right now, take the Clark Fork as a case in point:
Seasonal max is rallying while the discharge at Cabinet drops 10k over the last few days. That is light at the end of the tunnel, but there may be another tunnel after this runoff tunnel – the Northwest is losing its storage bullets:
Coulee is now in the 1270s and has but 16 feet to get functionally full. With 250k coming, they could be there by the end of next week, leaving two full weeks of no storage, all water either going over the top or through the turbines. Not good for June and will require all of Captain Hazelwood’s machinations to keep gas on the margin.
TransGen
Windy at NP and outages are falling apart across the ISO:
That’s what happens when no units trip and a few return:
We’d post the new outage table, but it would be blank 🙁
Palo Noms are nuts, a few days back they almost surpassed the highs from 2016 (days where Phoenix was 120). MidC noms are nuts too given the 250k inflows to Coulee, but they are below last year for the same June period.
Note how the AC is now swinging intraday, a sign of a bullish market. A few weeks back that plot was a straight line. Flows out of ZP were southbound in a big way a few days back, now they are barely flowing anywhere. The Canadians are buying again after a few days of selling.
Conclusions
Today we’ll look at some BOM markets:
Outrights screamed upwards in the ISO HL markets. How’d the derivs do?
Spreads
The market is starting to love the SP: PV, it’s near a period high; also seeing the ISO: MidC spreads moving up which we concur, the MidC is not out of the hydro woods just yet.
Rolls
A few contract lows here, and we were long all of those – oops. So do what every upside down trader does …. dollar cost average and double down. Yippee!