Good Morning,

Summer shows signs of being summer; she just isn’t willing to throw in the towel,; fat lady has one more tune to belt out; it ain’t over til it’s over. Let’s dive into weather, but be forewarned that isn’t the only fundy that shows signs of bullishness.

Demand

P-land back to the 90s, after she works through some chilly weather. Even Seattle is high 80s, but both have a cold Wednesday to digest, call it post-eclipse hangovers. The “heat” is short-lived and falls at the end of week/weekend, but take what Mother Nature gives you. Loads will pop up while the rivers are fading.

The Golden State sees some gold, but alas, just for a day or two. The front of this forecast is just, in a word, awful, but the back is either normal or well-above (Sacramento).

AZ and NV bake for a week, not like June hot but above normal.

Loads were up, week-on-week, for the ISO and MidC, and just flat for Palo.

The Temp Recap report also has a new table: Monthly Degree Day anomalies for the current month. Look at Denver’s bearish totals, down 35% from average, while the Northwest is above about the same.

Generation

SP gas outages have surged, so has ZP’s, while NP’s haven’t.

Desert View, Watson, and Mountain View are all offline where last week they were running. No units returned.

NP hit a two-week renewable high yesterday off of resurgent wind. MidC’s wind is also back, for the last week the hub has been pumping out the MWHs. SP’s renewables are sideways to off, seems it’s not blowing much down south.

Not a lot to say about the ISO’s resource recap, just sideways.

Hydro

ISO Hydro is in a freefall:

Especially in the off-peak, which indicates tight inflows as the ISO husband’s its scarce resource. Even the on-peak is starting to slide down, but both On and Off remain well above history.

Two of our stations are still setting five-year highs; four are above normal, but two are now just normal.

BC Hydro continues to crank on the Peace, and now we see some cuts come out of Arrow, all the while flows at the border are at five-year lows, which bodes bullish for the MidC’s hydro generation outlook.

This new dashboard shows flows through the turbines to the left and the forebay elevation on the right. Discharge took a huge tumble yesterday, down about 40,000 CFS. The cuts took place while BPA continued its draft of the reservoir. More draft is needed to get to 1278′ (soft target) by the end of the month.

Two of the Mid-C stations are running above normal, one is just average, and five are below normal. The big water year has turned into a very weak one as it is now just six weeks from expiry. There will be no carryover into WY18.

The total storage at MidC is now just normal, setting up WY18 to be neither bullish or bearish.

Markets

MidC had a weird settle last week; HL cleared under LL. I guess cutting Coulee may have contributed to that.

All the light load markets have enjoyed a tick up over the last couple of days rendering pressure on those BOM on|offs, but with some resurgent heat forecast, we’d expect the spread to push back out.

Transmission

A couple of observations concerning transmission flows:

Both the AC and DC are flowing less than capacity; that wasn’t the case last week, but the last two days each are running about 500 MW below TTC
Powerex was a big seller over the weekend, for nine hours (16-01) the marketer exported more than 2000 MW/hour; they have not sold that much over that many hours all summer. Their sales speaks to the MidC strength more than anything else.
Flows from Palo have trended up over the last week; the line is now exporting more energy than anytime this summer.

The COI line is scheduled for a derate on September 1; the 1600 MW derate was pushed back a day from last week’s schedule.

Conclusions

To follow in a subsequent post