Good Morning,

Well, it seems most of the cold weather is over, at least forecast-wise, though today is technically the last day of the cold.

Most of the WECC reverts to normal, maybe slightly below, and then slides into a warming trend per NOAA, though Dark Sky teases of another cold wave hitting LA and the Bay Area in days 9-10. We wouldn’t bet on that; we’d bet on every city on the west coast growing ten degrees warmer by the weekend.

That’s what NOAA painted yesterday, who knows what she’ll post today; these 6-10/8-14s have been all over the weather map, kind of like Sumas Spot or those pesky winter MidC rolls??? While we’re on the weather wagon, here’s the precip outlook:

These precip forecasts are as volatile as the temps, though the trend this winter has been to tease of catastrophic wetness in the 8-15 which turns to draught in the 1-6. Would only take one to land to revert the Northwest close to normal; Kally’s already there.

Let’s talk about gas since that fundy remains the WECC’s primary driver.

Westcoast Pipeline has restored nearly all of its southbound capacity, at least for the short-term. One alert reader pointed out this was just to serve the incremental cold-driven demand and suggested the pipe backs down to a “safer” pressure level. Not so sure about that, didn’t WEI just prove the pipes are safe? If I was a betting man, and once was, I’d be leaning more towards WEI going to 100% sooner rather than later. If so, most, if not all, of MidC’s Sumas premiums disappear. We already see that take place, but more on that in the post to follow. Also, take note of the disconnect between changes at Huntingdon versus Sumas. In past times, the R Value between the two points was nearly 1.00; not so much of late.

Something else we saw was the return of gas-fired power in the I-5 corridor:

Chehalis, Freddy, and Goldendale all fired up which means so did River Road. Of course, this was to serve load, but somehow, somewhere, the operators found the gas. Some of that they pulled from JP:

A big phat 200 MMCF draw, but compare that draw to other big winter draws – not even close the 600 pulled a few times in past cold events. This is interesting since it bookends what happens during a constrained Sumas day while Seattle posts lows in the high 20s and confirms a fear/hope/expectation that all the dire predictions were driven by hype and not reality. The truth is the system is reliable, and utilities hate posting unserved load. Just how did they dodge the blackout bullet?

BPA’s peak loads were up 2000 MWs, nothing to sneer at, but Hydro rallied 1400 and exports dropped 300. All of BPA’s cold snap load is thus met. Coulee provided much of the incremental power:

Flows through the turbines were up 30,000 cfs from last week, some of this came from increased inflows, the rest from drafting Coulee’s reservoir:

Coulee’s reservoir is not even close to its ten year low for this day of the year, suggesting there are more bullets left, though the number is finite. But what with more warm weather and possibly big wet, it seems the Northwestern Americans dodged a disaster. Given the return of the I-5 turbines and increased flows into Huntingdon perhaps those increased flows into Sumas saved the day?

Note something odd? Check out the rally in the derived Vancouver area demand (Huntingdon minus Sumas) and the Puget Area Demand (Sumas minus Chehalis). Either there is a lag between NWP and WEI’s nom cycles or the Canadians are not sharing the love. What happens when they loosen the Sumas spigot? Well, we could expect to see at least an additional 200 MMCF south-bound and those I-5 turbines run through the balance of winter.

Let’s look at DA LMPs to get an idea of how bad it indeed was this week.

Oh, prices came off, they didn’t rally. From the ridiculous Sunday for Monday clears, the LMPs tanked $65/mwh. Also take note of the massive PV congestion, almost every hour traded at a discount, a big one at that. As goes power, so goes gas – or is it the other way around?

Sumas is now trading at a discount to Socal Citygate with its single digit handle ($7). Term gas, too, came off.

Yet a fat premium remains, one that must be highly at risk should Sumas get its fair share of the Huntingdon rally. Socal is tighter…

Jan pulled back a bit, but the other bullets either rallied or drifted sideways. Let’s look at supply and demand.

Loads rallied in California, but not anywhere near last winter’s peaks. Equally important and relevant, check out the rallies in supply at both SCG and PG&E all of which speaks to the resiliency of the system. When needed, extra gas is found.

The nukes are in flux; Diablo #2 is back to 100% but #1 remains at 52%, we still think its heading towards refuel next week. Meanwhile, PV#2 is ramping up and should be at 100% by Monday. Not that PV needs PV2, the hub is congesting heavily into SP. Diablo, should it be offline for all of December, is more problematic if another cold snap settles into the Bay Area.

Renewables didn’t help the cause; every reporting hub is off. California’s solar was rained out yesterday, and the Northwest is back to being becalmed.

Finally, let’s look at how much power demand was booked:

Clearly, very bullish in the Northwest and the other hubs also rallied. The fact the DA LMPs came off during the event speaks to the solid supply fundamentals.

Conclusions

A bullet dodged, a hype exposed, and massive term price volatility. With warmer weather, and possibly big rain on the horizon, one can’t help but feel bearish, but that sentiment is best measured relative to the market, so on to that next.

 

Good morning,

Here is an in-depth look into the fundamentals affected by the Enbridge explosion.  Highlights include the  Westcoast Pipeline – Station #4 (South of Prince George) ramping up to pre-explosion levels and Sumas falling below Citygate in spot gas prices.

 

[render_email_report name=”Enbridge Daily Briefing”]

Good Morning,

 

The following reports reflect the energy impact of the most recent NWRFC STP.

Monthly

Energy Scorecard:

• December – Up 138 aMW
• January – Down 323 aMW
• February – Down  86 aMW
• March – Down 279 aMW

December added 138 aMW and notched its position as the only month with a week-on-week increase.  While December saw its second consecutive week of increases, January through March all saw moderate drops in forecast.  January followed up last week’s flat forecast with 323 aMW, and February saw its third-consecutive week of diminished forecast.  March continues its helter-skelter projections with a drop of 279 following last week’s 300+ aMW increase.

Daily

December began the forecast with a massive 1,800 aMW increase, but that slowly wilted down to an eventual week-on-week decrease by the 21st.  Aggregate that together and you end up with a monthly increase of 138 aMW.  January and February hold a steady 320-380 aMW decrease through each respective month with very little variation.  March gaps as much as 600 aMW by the 6th, but the difference shrinks to 450 aMW by the end of the month.

 

William

Good Morning,

I’ll conclude the day’s post by looking at some markets.

Today, we scrambled SP and MidC and are looking at just the April and in bullets. Let’s get after it.

This spread, April SP-MidC, is cheap and should be owned. All of these comments, today, are through the lens of an early return to full Westcoast capacity. Though MidC is in a draught and its TDA water supply is 87% as of Friday, we don’t believe any of that and are waiting for that one big storm to put the hub back to normal. Toss in real problems at Socal and perhaps no problems at Sumas, and you have a recipe for wide spreads. We’d buy this one.

Here’s a roll, March to Feb at SP, and we’d be tempted to buy this, except it is at the wrong hub. There are no fundamentals suggesting these rolls are miss-priced at SP, just at MidC. The fear is LA gets cold, like a 30 handle for a low and it lasts a week or two. With imports constrained and Aliso neutered, LA can’t serve load and spot soars. Odds of that are higher in Jan-Feb than March, hence the $20 premium. Pass.

The Feb spread and we think it is cheap, too. Feb has a better chance of big water than Dec or Jan because it can receive boosts from flood control; doubt we see big drafts if water supply remains an 80 handle, but still don’t believe it will.  The opportunity for going long the spreads arises If Enbridge restores Westcoast to 100%, then all of those MidC premiums go “poof” and are gone.

The March might be a better place to buy the spread given that the odds of a full restoration of WEI capacity are greater later than earlier.

This a pure gas play; if you think WEI goes to 100% before the end of Jan, sell this; if not, sell it off of warm weather.

Lower price, lower upside, higher odds of a win. Sell it, too.

These On|Offs blew out and will blow down should gas issues be resolved. This is March, sell it.

Want to buy something at MidC. All the rolls are fair targets, this one especially so since it is so far into the curve.

Jan’s now prompt and will get very volatile; we’d buy all the rolls, especially this one.

 

Good Morning,

ADMIN NOTE – I’ll be traveling to AZ for the week to visit customers; will still be responding to emails and chats but no calls.

Lots of news leading to a volatile market growing even more volatile. The great Siberian Express that was poised to slam into the Northwest and drive rolling Black Outs and disruptions to gas service has died on the vine. The cold is gone, its a warm anomaly, and to add salt to an open wound, Enbridge is making noise about bringing Westcoast back to full capacity months ahead of their first doomsday forecast. Yep, so buckle in, the roller coaster is leaving the station.

Compare the “Puget Area Demand” to that at Vancouver; both of these are derived values, but clearly, there is a disconnect between new gas arriving at Huntingdon and then showing up at Sumas. Most likely, just a timing issue. Those values at Vancouver are nearly as high as any seen last winter, let alone this summer, before the explosion.

See what we mean about warm; no matter how you slice/dice/and stir fry this dish, it’s bearish.

Precip is bearish, too; all of the WECC production basins are above normal, but they need it given where NWRFC has put its water supply.

TDA is now at 87% of normal, a bold move when the year is so young; bolder still, IHR sits at 85%. That’s them, our internal forecast is more bearish, we have both stations just below normal. The difference between the two models is how you treat the Oct-Nov anomaly – Ansergy weights it quite small, like maybe 10% of the water year while the RFC  treats it as an equal to Dec-Mar.

Hard to write a post with the word “Bearish” included when DAs clear $180. In fact, SP had its highest winter clear in six years:

Impressive, right? Until you plot the heat rate …

Then you see the lowest winter clear in six years. It’s a roller coaster out there; up is down and in is out.

What’s in is Socal Citygate and what’s out is Sumas; those two flipped and we’d be inclined to suggest Sumas is soon to mean revert back to the 1s and 2s. Should that happen, you’ll see the entire winter curve get turned upside down. Again, buying all those cheap rolls seems a safe way to play this … (Jan-Dec, Feb-Jan, Mar-Feb, Apr-Mar) – each is worth $10-20. Money for nothing and ur chix for free.

Why’s Socal rocking and rolling? Demand is up a bit and year-on-year supply is down; while PG&E demand soared.

Socal’s demand rallied hard but still lags all of last year’s peak days; but PG&E’s demand just set a winter peak. Not because it was that cold, it wasn’t, but because ZP is serving SP’s power load which means NP must self-generate as it would typically draw 3 gigs from ZP. We could point that out to you in the tranny flows if the nazi ISO hadn’t taken away our Path 15/26 reports.

This chart takes a longer view of PG&E demand – today’s nominations were only exceeded twice in the last six years, and it isn’t even that cold.

It is “colder” than last week and colder than previous years, same day, but not cold. It is more warm than cold in the Northwest. How are power loads faring?

Bullish, every hub is up with NP and Palo rallying the hardest. But all that says is how bearish it was last week.

Diablo #1 dropped to 51% on Friday. An alert reader pointed out that this was due to “Storm Surge”. But wouldn’t #2 be impacted by those same waves? After all, #2 gets its cooling water from the same ocean. Watch #1, we think its due for a refuel, others say that won’t happen until Feb. If they do make it until then it would be the longest stretch between refuels in the last twenty years.

Check out those NP15 noms; almost as high as the peak summer levels and way beyond last winter. Why? SP can’t afford to burn $17 gas, so it leans on its friends to serve its load – check out the hub’s other friends.

Mead, Palo, and Utah are all sending more power to SP15; why wouldn’t they, $111 dailies and their gas is just $3-4. Even BC is jumping on, one hour they sold 2 gigs to MidC.

Timing was good – the ISO saw a near record total renewables over the weekend, during those extremely high prices. Sadly, BPA didn’t get much from its wind turbines.

The Northwest’s precip outlook in days 1-5 is next to nothing; two weeks ago this was like 2″. Just goes to show these winter storms are moving targets, just because they show up in the 8-14 means nothing.

Our Portland friends are piling on the bear wagon. They jacked their 10 day nearly 2 gigs. Recall, a week ago they backed off their ten day by the same amount. Up / down / merry go  around. If their sentiment holds, will be a bearish BOM STP today.

BPA bumped TTC on the AC and has a series of outages on the DC which takes the line to zero.

Conclusions

We’d sell the entire MidC curve out through March off the Westcoast news and possibly SP BOM off of a return to warm anomalies. Neither north or south have any hints of big HDD, spot gas is going to crash once this week’s “cold” is displaced by warm. More on that in the next post.

 

 

Greetings,

Westcoast released an update on the pipe. It appears capacity restoration is being accelerated. Here is the text of their release:

 

As near as I can tell, the pipe’s capacity is on a fast-track towards complete restoration. This weekend the plan appears to bring Hungtingdon up to 1.4 bcf.

Here are where flows are at as of 12:00 PM Sunday (PST) –

That’s the 7-year view, let’s zoom in on this last year:

Since Thursday (Nov 29), flows at Hungtingdon are up 240 MMCF and, per WEI, another 90 MMCF will be added today or tomorrow. More important, if the intent is to get the pipe’s capacity fully restored, you should expect another 400 MMCF to return the capacity to 1.8 BCF, last year’s winter levels. At that point, there are no “Sumas Gas Issues,” and most of the winter anomalies will be gone.

I’m not saying the pipe will be fully restored, read their posts, but it seems the chances of full capacity before March 2019 are higher today than on October 10, 2018.

On top of that bearish news, check out the latest weather …

Recall, the forecast looked like this last week:

Hhmm, the plot thickens, the pot boiling over, sea change poised to wash away the long’s gains? Speaking of washing … check out the 8-14 day precip outlook:

Sadly, stole my blog thunder for tomorrow, but felt this news was important enough to warrant a Sunday blast.

Cheers,

Mike

Good Afternoon,

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Good Morning,

It’s MidC’s turn on the hot seat; appropos given the arrival of cold weather, problems in the gas world, and reservoirs that are over-drafted. Let’s see what Mr. Market thinks of all of this.

We use APT to sort the trades and rank them; I”m reporting in period-sorted order. Click on Rank or WoW to reorder.

Dec rallied, duh, but interesting that the heat rate tanked. I’d a thought that if total demand increases the heat rate would rally; I guess the explanation would be that the price is relatively low given the gas move. We’d buy the Dec as a lotto ticket thinking if it is frigid next week there will be a remote chance of unserved load (either gas or power, doesn’t matter which). Should that happen, cash in the triple (or quad???) digits is not unreasonable.  Long.

This heat rate is more reasonable but still cheap. If you like Dec you have to like Jan, the R-value between the two is almost 1.00.  Long.

The roll grows ever-cheaper as the market becomes ever more paranoid, but we think the spread is rational, though we’re long both so would ignore the roll. That said, if we were to be bearish next week, we’d buy this for the $-30.

Hah, Feb hardly moved. Like Jan, if you like Dec you need to own this too, unless VaR is an issue. I guess it comes down to which do you want, Dec, Jan, or Feb. We’ll take all three; our VaR is infinite.

Feb to Jan is $-25 and tanked $10 in a week. The bearish case for this roll (it drops more) goes along these lines. It is freezing next week and BPA drafts everything creating a hole for the rest of Winter – then another cold wave descends upon the MidC. Further, JP and Mist get sucked dry, and WEI doesn’t open the spigot. That said, we’re long all three so forget the roll.

Interesting, March has come off in the last week. If you are trading the MidC from a water-perspective, it might not be a bad move given the big storms. But there is more than that driver at play. Still, you can’t be long everywhere and shorting here might cover a small piece of pain should next week be a misfire.

Buying the roll ($-18) is the bearish strategy. Let’s say the markets scream on Monday and your length is in the money. One approach would be to flip out of the length and sell every one of these rolls. Then you hope the 8-15 day precip is reality and the warm trend builds. It won’t take but a few weeks for BPA to restore its reservoirs and extended wet would put another 3000 aMW of zero cost hydro into MidC’s supply stack.

We love the Apr-Mar, May-Apr, Jun-May, Jul-June rolls, but it is too early to bet on timing of runoff, we don’t even know what the runoff volumes are. OK, but the April is at a contract high and the WEI issues should be just memories and Sumas will settle back to the 1s and 2s. What if these wet patterns extend into Jan? That bearish scenario suggests April may be over-priced and is a decent short candidate to hedge some of your length in the front.

The Apr-Mar is just a gas play; WEI has said they’ll keep the pipe at 80% through March; the roll is $-14 because of that. Should that derate change, this roll will be closer to flat.

We won’t bother with the Qs today, the market is all about the very front of the curve.

 

 

 

Good Morning,

The cold got colder and the markets rallied. The million dollars (bonus???) question is how cold it will get and will the gas markets have the supply to serve those loads? As for how severe, it is cold, but not record cold:

Rarely will you see the entire continental USA blue, you did yesterday in NOAA’s 6-10 day. The 11-14 backs off from cold and reverts to warm anomalies on the load-center west coast.

San Jose saw its forecast grow colder, day on day, and so did Phoenix, while Portland’s got a shade warmer in the digital version. But it is all relative, and these temperatures, versus all of November, are at least ten degrees colder. Gas demand will spike, so will power, and the tenuous WECC energy infrastructure will be tested. We’d always be biased towards the stability and reliability of the system versus the “sky’s falling,” and the “end is near” and “Trump will get re-elected.”

That glass “half-full” idea is predicated on BPA drafting hard on its reservoirs, cutting transmission exports, and pulling max withdrawals from JP and Mist. We think a short-duration cold snap is no problem for the MidC, Socal might be a different story since they cannot drawdown their storage at “max.” We’ll see, the days of Reckoning are Dec  5-7. By the way, I’ll be in Phoenix those days but responding to emails and chats.

Last weekend we saw flows out of Station 4 on WEI spike up; now we’re seeing some of that gain given back. Plus, that pesky maintenance on Westcoast lingers …

It is hard to believe Enbridge would actually cut 40% of its capacity on arguably the three coldest days of 2018-19, isn’t it???

The above isn’t on the website; it’s a special report we’ve compiled which tracks the impact of the WEI derates for both WEI and NWP. The top section is the WEI points; bottom is NWP.

The markets are very choppy and aren’t moving in dimes and quarters, more like dollars. Check out the AECO prices and that AECO-Kingsgate spread? Is that other-worldly, or what?

Socal Citygate is less choppy, that hub just goes up. Some of that bullishness is driven by this expected cold weather and its impact on storage; the rest from the Nymex gone Crazy.

California gas demand is already rallying, before the cold even lands. Socal is up 700 MMCF, week-on-week, and PG&E bounced 400 MMCF – over a BCF a day more demand in Kally and the cold hasn’t arrived! Socal has seen big draws (400) over the last two days, so has PG&E. Though the latter has not the withdrawal constraints that the former operates under, it has much less total gas to work with, like 30 BCF less than a few years earlier. A cold winter may be problematic for PG&E. On top of being liable for every fire ever started in the state of California, now it might run out of gas and get sued for that, too.

SP’s loads ticked up, Palo too, though just barely. MidC saw its load come off while NP is just sideways. All of that will change once this cold weather strikes.

Timing is everything, and now one of the Diablo units is having troubles; we think its preparing for refuel, though we show 13 days left in the tank. How poorly timed would that be if they take the unit down in front of this cold weather? The PV#2 unit is still off; this is one of the longer refuels any Palo unit has seen.

Palo noms are up off of higher loads; the rest of the hubs are sideways.

MidC’s are sideways because there isn’t the fuel to run the I-5 units; I doubt they run in the cold snap, either. Avista is firing up its 11.5k peaker in anticipation of cold.

That’s weird, the solar at ZP and NP – like nearly zero. I guess that is what happens when the air is saturated with rain.

The above is yesterday’s radar – the state got slammed, but so did Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Meanwhile, the RFC has materially ratcheted down its Water Supply Forecasts.

Huh? You’d think the plots got dryer, but they are very wet:

Let’s zoom in on that NCEF:

The Northwest westside is poised to get 5-10″ in the 8-15 day; the producing east side will enjoy 2-3″; these are massive anomalies and should they land as painted above, will put the Northwest “ABOVE” normal. Yet our Portland pals don’t see it that way. Even before this event lands, things are not that dry:

We examined all the snow pillows, mapped to our production basins, and compared the current SWE versus normal. 83% of Clearwater’s stations are above normal, in fact, most of the major rivers are doing “OK” as of 11/28. The real dry stations are the mostly irrelevant westside stories (irrelevant unless you own production there). Now, toss in about 2-3″ on everything east of the Cascades and all those are now above normal; throwing in 5″ on the west side and those are above average.

Above, that is the entire WECC (US), but things can change quickly (anomaly-wise) this early in the water year. Look at these snow cover maps:

November 1, 2018

November 21, 2018

November 28, 2018

Or, compare NRCS’s SWE maps:

November 21, 2018

November 28, 2018

Oh my, Kalistan went from <25% of normal to >175% in a week. LOL. But the changes were not just there, check out the Snake changes. And this is before another significant storm lands.

 

Some of that recent precip is finding its way through the penstocks and driving the turbines. All of these stations are above Coulee, all have rallied of late.

Northwest hydro has backed down from a few weeks earlier; we have to think it rallies next week to serve load. And check out those thermal cuts, year-on-year(Sumas issues).

The water behind the reservoirs is essential for MidC. That water is the escape valve when things get tight, but those storage levels are down at both MidC and BC; each has pulled a MAF since October and may very well pull another MAF next week. At some point, the bullets are spent all of which puts pressure on Mar-April given that the flood control draft happened in Dec.

Sometimes we jokingly refer to the NWRFC as the Random Forecast Center – just look at the above plot to see why. Last week, going out, they forecasted huge flows, now they’ve cut those way back – all in the face of very cold (draft-induced flows) and a potentially massive storm.

Not a lot of surprises in transmission flows. None of the lines are even close to TTC; we’d expect even less to flow out of the NW next week; don’t think MidC will have much energy to spare; doubt Powerex will, either.

Conclusions

Still a bull; without weather warming, I’d wait to see how cash (gas and power) behaves next week. Too risky to be naked short anything going into the weekend in front of the first cold snap of the season. All of this water, however, could quickly change that temperament. For now, we’d be cautiously long going into next week, but more on that in the next post to follow shortly.

Good morning,

 

NOAA Forecast Images

The blue blob of winter weather is centered in Wyoming but it’s stretching across the entirety of the West, especially from the Great Basin north.  The following week is less extreme but cooler temps look to linger everywhere outside of Southern California.

Precipitation Forecast

The Northwest will be cold but dry this week, while California and the Southwest may see a slightly higher than normal amount of precip.  Next week will bring a considerable amount of rain to Northern California and a return of wet weather to the Northwest.  Nearly everything east of the Rockies is projecting a normal amount of precip.

LMP Spreads

SP-PV showed a difference of $31 at their peak and $12 when comparing their low prices yesterday.  SP-NP had no difference at their peak price yesterday while SP-Capt Jack had $3.

Futures

Crude was essentially flat today following a $0.02 decline, bucking the one-day $1.20 rally from Monday.  Gas managed a $0.06 climb but was up as much as $0.12 at its peak yesterday.  Futures remain highly elevated.

West Term Gas Prices

December Sumas rallied strong yesterday with a $3.61 increase day-on-day, this on the back of a week-long drop in price.  Socal City had its own rally of $0.85 as well.  January Sumas jumped as well though more modest at $1.50.  Citygate stayed flat in January.

Gas Storage

Jackson Prairie storage ran positive again yesterday after adding another 42 MCF to storage.  That marks the 5th-straight day of injections, though it was off 97 MMCF from Monday.

Spot Gas

Sumas spot rose to $11.77, up just over a dollar from Monday but up more than $2.00 week-on-week.  Malin fell $0.30 day-on-day and is now more than $0.50 off its high on the 21st.

AECO crashed back below a dollar and settled at $0.42, its lowest price of the month.

Mid-C Demand

Seattle shows no sign of peeking its head into the 50’s any time in the near future as today tops out at 49, but that sets the high watermark.  Lows fall well below freezing half way through next week and highs will struggle to reach 40.

Loads were most flat yesterday as peak demand stayed flat through the weekend.

NP 15 Demand

NP peak demand was up just over 100 MW day-on-day but was down 100 MW from its low in comparison.  Loads were also mostly down week-on-week.

San Jose is projecting a high of 65 today, five degrees above its 10-year average, but highs well drop off sharply, falling well into the 50’s by the weekend.  Daily lows could dip as far as 39 by the 3rd of December.

SP-15 Demand

SP peak demand fell more than 700 MW day-on-day yesterday though off-peak demand rose 500 MW.  Loads were off roughly 600 MW week-on-week as well.

Burbank is looking at a high of 69 today, just a degree north of average, but it too will see a considerable drop over the next week as temps fall as low as 40 by the 3rd.  If that low temp holds true, it would equate to 10-degrees below normal.

PV Demand

Not to be left out, Phoenix will get its share of cool weather next week as well.  Temps drop from a comfortable mid-70s high today and tomorrow to the mid-50’s by next Monday.  Overnight temps could dip to 39 by the 4th.

Las Vegas is even colder as we are currently projecting freezing temps for the 3rd and 4th and 30 and 31 degrees, respectively.  Temps may fail to reach 50 on each of those days as well.

Nuke Status

PV2 remains in refuel mode at 0% while all other plants stay at 100%.

Gas Plant Noms

SP gas noms fell to 766,000 MCF, down 100,000 day-on-day and roughly the same difference week-on-week.  Mid-C noms ticked up another 20,000 MCF but haven’t varied by more than 80,000 MCF since the 5th of November.

Renewables

SP-15 solar was peaking at just 4,200 MW on the 22nd but has since been able to generate more than 5,300 as of the 26th.  Wind had a heavy presence from the 22nd through the 24th as no hour averaged less than 1,400 MW.

Mid-C wind peaked at 1,900 and 2,300 on the 22nd and 23rd respectively but fell off sharply soon after.  Wind managed a small comeback on the 26th with most hours averaging just over 400 MW.

ISO Gas Outages

Gas outages are up more than 2,000 MW week-on-week after another 600 MW of outages were tacked on to yesterday’s totals.

ISO Outage Unit Data

Two of the largest contributors to the increased outage counts are highlighted here — CENTRAL LA ROSITA II COMBINED CYCLE and LR2, both at 322 MW.

Hydro

 

PNW Reservoirs

Mica is sitting at 25′ below average though that’s three feet closer to average compared to where it was at the end of October.  Arrow is down to 1,424′ and falling and diverting from the trend we see in the average line in the process.

Week-on-Week Snow Anomaly

This week brought on considerably more snow in the Rockies in addition to a heavy dumping in the Sierra Nevada.  The Cascades remain well below average, however.  We’ll see if next week’s cold and wet weather is enough to bring the anomalies closer to 75% at least.

Snow Depth Summary

Wanapum and Rocky Beach each added more than half an inch over the past three days.  24 of the 30 tabled stations saw more than an inch of snow depth over the past week, however, while the remaining six were made up primarily of Montana stations.

Snow Depth Chart

Priest Rapids saw the most week-on-week build with 1.75″ tacked on.  It came at the right time as the station has had a very late start to the snow year, as the chart above illustrates.

Transmission

 

BPA TTC

No week on week changes for either the COI or NOB lines, though each is set to see their TTC drop sharply by 10AM PST today.

 

 

 

Have a wonderful day,

 

William