Product Update – Northwest Hydro Energy

Greetings,

The NWCOE has a wealth of information, and like any precious minneral, you have to work hard to mine it. Ansergy can do the work for you via our real-time scrapes of the entire COE data set. Our latest offering is a basket of energy-related reports, including Energy (MWh), Capacity (MW – both online and outages), and Spinning Reserve. We use all of the above in our Northwest hydro energy forecast, we have been for the last year, but today we are offering those critical inputs as data feeds to our clients.

All of our reports are updated hourly, from spin to energy to capacity. View the data from a summary table highlighting change, or plot hourly by plant or totals. You can also plot the last five years for any of the 30+ plants we track.

Energy Reports

At first glance, you might be yawning, but we’d suggest putting a hand over your mouth and read on. The COE has always published energy, but they make you wait a week to get it. For long-term forecasting, no big deal, but wouldn’t it be nice for your real-time peeps to see this within the hour? We think so:

The above is in our standard summary format with the most recent hour (CUR) displayed as the first data item. H1 is the previous hour, H2 two hours prior; D1 is yesterday, same hour, D2 is two days back, same hour. W1 is the same hour, a week ago, Y1 is a year ago, the same day of the week, same hour. Easy, huh?

We track energy (MWH) for 29 projects:

Group these by Federal to arrive at Slice, or in total to see 80% of the Northwest’s real-time hydro generation.  If you want to see 100% of actuals or 100% of projected forward, just ask, we have that too.

Sometimes a picture says more than a screen full of numbers. Usually, it does. You can plot any of the 29 projects, or as sub-totals (SLICE) hourly. NOTE: the last 168 hours are extrapolated using the prior 336 hour’s ratio of QG/VE by Day of Week and Hour. In other words, it is quite close, unless there is an outage.

Speaking of outages, you can track those for a few of the projects using the COE’s capacity data for five projects:

Look at Wanapum, two days ago the capacity was 874, then it dropped to 640, and now its back to the 870s. Sadly, the COE doesn’t give capacity values for all the projects; these are the only ones. That said, a half-full glass is better than an empty one. You can view the above as either Online (Published Capacity) or Offline (Peak Capacity – Current Capacity).

You can also plot the data; this chart is daily for the last five years for GCL. Note we are plotting only outage, you can also overlay Online into the chart.

The Chief Joseph plots MW online; you can do both as well.

Equally interesting, and material, is the spin published by the Corps. The above chart plots the total Mid-C spin from a basket of plants.

Same plot, just the last five years of total spin for the Corps projects. Check out the delta in 2016 – over 700 MW cut in the spin for a few weeks.  Getting this right is critical to getting your Slice, or Mid-C hydro energy, right.

Contact Garrett or Bill for help setting up your bookmarks/dashboards. You can find the data here:

Fundamentals / Hydro / COE Energy

If you would like to receive an Emailed Report of the above let either know.

Cheers,