Good Morning,

The weather turns sour everywhere; loads are going to take a dive; prices will follow. Gloomy outlook as summer makes a fast retreat to Fall.

These are some ugly Northwest 21 day outlooks, but if gets any uglier it starts getting beautiful, as in heating load. For now, it’s just ugly.

California isn’t much better, though the state still has solid cooling load, nothing like it saw a  week ago.

Even AZ cools and is now below normal, a normal that is tumbling fast and hard. Still, the hub is keeping lots of gas units running and remains, relative to the other WECC hubs, bullish as evidenced by gas noms:

Surprisingly, the MidC is still at near peak summer levels, PV is there, and SP is not too far behind. All of which means a lot of gas units are going to be taken off line, for economics, next week. Upsides are going to be limited by so much idle capacity, the value of daily calls is tanking.

At least the ISO gas outages have ticked up, especially at NP15, but hey, that’s the hub that has the lowest noms relative to summer peak. In other words, so what!

And if that dismal Degree Day outlook isn’t enough to rain on your parade, how about some real rain? The Northwest has two mini-systems passing by. Neither are material, but both are indicative of the changing world up north.

Check out those loadings on the NOB and COB lines; both are hitting TTC caps continuously, a further indication the Northwest is long. Now the AC is derated, and those caps have even been surpassed for a few hours. Interesting, look at PV flows into SP, these are off from last week. I guess the ISO price is so low the Arizonans are passing. Flows northbound out of ZP are approaching TTC limits, another sign of a long system

Conclusions

It’s uglier, and we’ll write about the back-end of the curve in a post to follow. Bottom line, avoid length to preserve your bottom line.