Good afternoon,
The heat will peak in the first half of the next two weeks, especially in the Southwest as there is an 80% chance of above-normal temps. The Northwest is expected to fall back to normal by days 8-14 while the heat should linger elsewhere, albeit subdued.
Northwest remains the only region with above-normal precip forecast for the next two weeks. The Great Basin should be particularly dry.
SP showed a peak price eight dollars higher than NP yesterday, and today is looking like much of the same.
AECO is still sinking, now at just $0.17, a 91% drop over the past week. Socal-Citygate came off 30 cents since Tuesday, while Stanfield 25 cents in the same span of time.
Gas fell three cents over two hours this morning, while crude jumped $0.89 in nearly the same span of time.
PV gas demand hit 1,403 MMCF today, an increase of 64 MMCS since Wednesday and the highest level since April 24th.
Seattle is projecting a high of 74 for both Sunday and Tuesday, while Monday sits lower at 71. These highs are coming off the back of today’s peak of just 61. Spokane is showing signs of 80’s by Tuesday as well, likely to make a large dent in the upper elevation snowpack.
Demand fell again yesterday after dropping each consecutive day since Monday’s 17,129 MW (yesterday averaged 16,525 MW). Off-Peak demand dipped as low as 12,929 last night.
Sacramento shows high mostly in the 80’s over the next week with Sunday marking the lowest high at 77, though that still fails to drop below normal. Much cooler in San Jose today with a high of just 66.
Demand fell 45 MW, mostly noise, as the week stayed relatively flat at 11,027 MW in the daily average. Peak hourly demand reached 12,626 MW, the highest hour in the past week.
SP demand stayed took a relatively sharp fall of 270 MW day-on-day yesterday despite peak hourly demand reaching its highest hour of the week (14,937 MW). Mid-day hours nose-dived compared to the rest of the week.
Burbank projects a high of 87 today (12 above normal) before jumping into the 90s over the weekend and peaking at 91 tomorrow. The rest of the three-week forecast predicts above-normal highs as well.
Phoenix shows a high of 94 today but temps will jump well into the triple digits by Sunday with a projected high of 106 (14 degrees above normal). All of next week shows highs in the 100’s.
Average daily demand soared yesterday as PV began to heat up. Demand rose 1,200 MW to 9,184 MW, and peaked at 11,381 in the hourly peak demand.
No changes to the Nuke Status report for today.
PV gas noms are fell 55,000 MCF today, and that follows yesterday’s jump of 96,000 MCF. NP gas noms have risen 107,000 MCF since last Friday.
SP and ZP both saw solar generation peak heavily yesterday with 6,396 MW and 1,645 MW respectively. SP’s solar was the highest hour in the past seven days.
Mid-C wind bounced back overnight with generation peaking at 2,721 MW after failing to top 1,600 MW in either of the previous two days.
NP gas outages jumped 1,400 MW to 4,119 MW yesterday and held that position today. SP outages increased and reached back above 3,000 MW today after seeing a 1,200 MW return the day before.
Hydro
Western Montana is the only station with a moderately-filled precip forecast, though most days hover around a tenth of an inch. Seattle shows potential for a heavy day of rain at 0.52″ next Friday, but at a week out, it’s nothing to bank on.
San Jose checks in as the only station projecting measurable precip, though at just 0.01″, it may as well be blank like the others.
Tahoe projects above normal in both daily highs and daily lows. It’ll be warm enough to take a deeper cut in the higher elevations (Squaw Valley projects highs in the upper-50’s).
Clark Fork has tapered off, but is still setting new daily 10-year highs in CFS flows. Wenatchee is seeing a second surge, enough to generate new 10-year highs of its own. Meanwhile Pend Oreille is slowly building up steam as a winters worth of snowpack upstream waits to melt.
Spokane is holding steady at close to 20,000 CFS, seemingly unrelated to the elevation of up-stream Lake Coeur d’Alene which raised and lowered multiple times over the past two weeks.
Everyone not named Grand Coulee is filling up. Dworshak is 24 feet lower than the same date last year, and Hungry Horse comes in 50 feet lower.
The Northwest mountains remains well covered, especially Montana with most stations checking in greater than 125% of normal and plenty more at greater than 150%.
Heavy additions to the 10-day forecast on the backend where we see a deviation from STP and the forecast from three days ago. 2,100 aMW were added to the forecast from the 7th to the 13th.
HL and LL are holding relatively steady in the max, min, and average.
Transmission
No changes to note in BPA TTC, as each held the same projection as yesterday and the day before.
Energy Oracle
For those of you unfamiliar with Energy Oracle, the following description had been included in the automated Oracle emails we have been running. Note: Oracle will now be included in our daily blogs instead.
In a thinly traded market, the opportunities are many, the time horizon to execute (either spec or hedge) is narrow. Ansergy scours 388 potential execution opportunities several times a day and ranks all of those against each other. We call that process “APT” – Algorithmic Power Trading, and yes, this has been used with a real book, and yes again, it does work. You can view APT from a hub, derivative, hour type, or compare all opportunities against each other (we call this the ‘WECC’ level).
In this report, we summarize the term markets for quarters (Prompt Q out two years) for all four derivative types (Outrights, Locational Spreads, Period Rolls, and On|Off). From that expansive list of opportunities, we will cull a few that looked intriguing. Ansergy does not make execution recommendations, we simply highlight execution opportunities. In the tables and charts that follow we will cast light upon a couple that caught our eye. We suggest you examine your firm’s exposure to that product (or lack thereof) and draw your own conclusions.
Note on Hedging vs Speculation: we view the hedger’s (Utility, End User, Generator) decision-making process being the same as the Speculator. In other words, APT is equally apt for either user type since both are driven by the same goal of capturing the best price.
Here are today’s notable charts, derived from the APT Summary rankings.
New contract low for the SP-PV LL spread in July 2018. Ansergy called for a buy with strong sentiment.
Ansergy has been recommending a buy for a while now and saw profit peak at $0.90.
Every trade has a PID (product ID) that can be called within the APT History table linked above, the one depicted is PID 652. Hindsight is 20/20, but this at least gives you an idea of how often the recommendation has been correct.
Have a great day,
William