Good Morning,

Ansergy updates its intraday analysis on the public chat forum embedded on its site. This is just a reminder to log and check it once a day. I post 2-3 times each day, others also add content as warranted. That Public Chat content will not be disseminated anywhere else.

Chat Instructions

Once you log onto the Ansergy website you will see the following screen:

 

In the lower right corner is a chat icon which lists the # of new posts since you last logged – in this example, there were two new posts. Click the icon.

 

 

The expanded chat icon shows a “Public Room” and lists the Ansergy analysts currently online. You can private message us with a question or comment or you can open the Public Chatroom where we are posting our intra-day updates.

 

 

I recommend opening the public chatroom in its own tab, click that icon to do just that.

 

 

Voila, you are there. Keep this open intra-day as we post throughout the day. Our latest posts reference critical maintenance work on Westcoast, check it out – Westcoast Maintenance Schedule

Cheers,

Mike

 

Good Morning,

 

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

Monthly

Energy Scorecard:

• November – Down 738 aMW
• December – Up 363 aMW
• January – Up 53 aMW
• February – Down 72 aMW
• March – Up 428 aMW

This week’s 738 aMW decrease in November essentially wiped out the gain we saw last week, leaving the current projection lower than any of the previous four forecasts.  December reversed trend with a 363 aMW jump, while January added a very modest 53 aMW.  February dropped 72 aMW coming off last week’s sharp drop.  March now has enough data to join the table above, and it shows up with a 428 aMW gain.

Daily

November drops off immediately and holds that deficit well into December.  Dec 9th sees the course reversed as the current forecast gaps as high as 1,200 aMW above last week.  There are small gains from the 1st-3rd of January, though the remainder of the months is essentially par.  February held a 70 aMW drop through the entirety of the month.  March does the same until the final week where the increase can be attributed to new data.

Year on Year

With today’s cuts, November is now forecasting below all but three years since 2001.  December inched ahead of 2002 and 2003 but remains behind the remaining years.  January looks to be the sole month that is pacing at least average.

 

William

Good Morning,

Today we’ll look at the SP15 HL markets, both outrights and rolls. Last week we studied the MidC, maybe on Thursday we’ll look at all markets?

The following APT table will be the order in which we report.

Click the above link to resort or select a different basket of opportunities.

BOM’s BOW but we’ll post anyways. By the time the cold hits, Nov will be in the history books; for now, it’s in the history books because the price is in the 70s.  With $7 gas that is where it belongs, pass.

Dec is soon to be new BOM, for now, it’s just Prompt and an expensive proposition to consider. Heatrate-wise, it just bounced off a contract low, price-wise it just set a contract high. Blame it on gas, Socal’s an enraged and neutered bull in the china shop; her horns are swinging wildly impaling anyone who gets close (i.e., short). In light of this cold weather, we’d buy it and hope gas blows out to $30. After all, it didn’t take much to blowup Citygate last year:

It seems any temperature forecast approaching a thirty handle gets the ute (and the market) cold and bothered; current forecast is 42. What if that drops another five degrees? For starters, system demand will gap up at least half a B. Long.

Kind of a meaningless roll given the short tenure of Nov, but crazy heat rate plot, huh?

Jan looks like Dec, except the forecast is higher than the market. By the way, we’ll be releasing a new set of historical forecasts next month that incorporate numerous model changes – more on that in another post. If you like Dec, why not like Jan? Let’s look at the roll to see how much to like or hate.

Wow, all over the proverbial map. Those lows were a great buy, and it still hints of buy, but instead, we’d just buy both of them off of the cold.

Feb looks rich, but what isn’t at SP? Roll time …

Hah, the roll is actually reasonably priced which suggests doing nothing with Feb, just be long Dec-Jan.

March is like the end of winter and a long way out. It also is a massively high price (and cheap heat rate).  Any front rally will bring this up but not as much and any crash this will come off, but not as much. We’d pass, but let’s look at the roll to Feb.

Super cheap, market assumes little winter premium in March, perhaps rightfully so, though last year’s peak demand occurred on Feb 27:

Q2 has been on a bull run since early August; it hasn’t even paused once; kind of like the DOW during Trump’s first year; now look at that DOW. We’d pass but look to the roll for more guidance.

Relative to the One, the Two is cheap, but this is a pure cold-weather play. You buy the roll to fade cold weather, which was a good play until this weekend, now there is a real threat of cold. Perhaps wait to see how cold it gets this week, and how cheap this roll gets priced, then buy it???

The Q3 heat rate took a dump over the last week meaning power rallied while gas went sideways. I’d want to see this relative to the two and four.

It is rich to the two, and …

Rich to the four. But why wouldn’t it be after last summer’s catastrophe? Unless Socal fixes something, anything, next summer will just be deja vu all over again.

Q4 just goes up, just like every other strip at SP. One difference here is the heat rate is also going up suggesting Q4 may be getting over-priced; it is moving up faster than the price of gas, and fundamentally nothing is getting more bullish (fuel aside). If you wanted a short at SP, this is where I’d put it on.

Same charts.

The roll is reasonably priced, so why bother? I’d play the front off of weather, and now it is looking cold and we’d roll the SP dice and go long Dec and Jan and forget the rest of the curve.

Good Morning,

A lot of changes took place over the long weekend. The Weather Outlook turned from warm to cold across most of the WECC, including the load centers. This will become the first cold event of the year and may become problematic with the gas situation in both North and South. Westcoast also threw a curveball by jacking southbound flows — Station 4 enjoyed a 300 MMCF bump, most of which made it to Hungtingdon.

Let’s zoom in on Hungtingdon and Sumas:

and look at the numbers:

This is a derived table (from the pipe data) comparing last year (Oct 1 through Nov 25) versus the period right after the explosion (Oct 10 to Nov 20) versus this last week (Nov 21 to Nov 26). The average Huntingdon haircut was 641 MMCF, and now 298 MMCF of that has been restored.

The split between Fortis and Sumas looks about 50:50; Hungtingdon average bump was 294 MMCF while Sumas saw a 145 increase but remains 280 MMCF behind last year. The average flows at Sumas from Dec 1 to Mar 31, last year, were 1095 MMCF, or about 470 MMCF less than last week’s average, after the bump. Clearly, MidC is not out of the gas doghouse just yet.

The other big news was the weather …

The cold anomaly has spilled into the coastal cities for the first time this year. Even LA gets cold …

Burbank flirts with a 10-year low later this week and, if you trust the 7-10 day forecast, it gets another blast of cold. Portland and Seattle are chilly, not cold – 20s would be cold, this forecast puts each in the low 30s. Still, next weekend will be the biggest test of the post-gas apocalypse. Here’s the hourly view of the temperature forecast …

The cold is more pronounced hourly with both Burbank and Phoenix setting or matching ten-year lows. So loads (power and gas) will go up, but is it cold enough to trigger blackouts? No, we don’t think so. Even if it was cold enough, there are bullets to prevent that. On the power side, BPA can draft its reservoirs and generate another five gigs of hydro and Mist and Jackson can replace most of the lost Sumas imports – for a few days.

Meanwhile, the market crushed Sumas.

Double-digit Sumas? Not anymore, Friday’s going out price was in the mid 7s. Socal didn’t move much, however.

In fact, the Citygate rallied while Sumas plummetted – all off of a 150 MMCF bump at Sumas. That’s rounding error in Socal’s gas nightmare world.

All the while, Jackson has been building during its “draw” season.

Not true at PG&E, storage in NoCal is dumping and is at a four year low.

While loads are ticking up and soon to be gapping up off of that cold weather, supply won’t change much, though Socal Gas has scheduled another Wheeler Ridge outage next week – they might want to reconsider that strategy.

Power loads are off or sideways at all four hubs. Expect these plots to get more bullish by week’s end.

California city’s lows will drop 4-8 degrees from yesterday, the Northwest may be a bit less.

SP’s gas noms tanked off of those high Citygate spot prices; consequently, NP15’s power gas noms rallied as ZP serves SP’s loads.

SP15 saw a 15-day high in renewables yesterday, but not NP, there was no wind in the northern portion of the state, or it was dispatched. The Northwest’s wind was non-existent for a week, but yesterday saw a couple of gigs.

A new dashboard, this one looks at the MidC’s weekly Loads and Resource Reports. The first set of tables compares week-on-week averages and the latter set does the same for year-on-year weekly averages. I find this quite useful for getting a relative sense of where things are today versus the recent past or the last ten years.

Sidebar Report. These plot the 5 minute flows for PacEast and PacWest and are mirror images of themselves. PacWest exports every hour and PacEast imports every hour. Do they need the ISO to do that?

Significant rain arrived along with the cold, though the precip was more prominent before the cold snuck into the outlook. Still, California is poised to get over an inch of precip across the state but will receive less than what was forecasted four days earlier.

The Northwest toyed with big rain for a few days, now not so much. Instead of Inches of SWE, it will receive HDD.

Hey, it’s now deep enough into the water year where anomalies start to matter. Too bad that significant precip forecast didn’t stick around, these 92% forecasts would have surged back to the high 90s. Ansergy is sticking to its forecasts, just below average, even though they are materially higher than NWRFC’s. We’ll see who gets this right in February.

Coulee discharge dropped primarily because the Lake Pend Oreille draft has ended. Perhaps BPA is preserving bullets?

Mica storage is at a ten-year low, so is Lake Pend Oreille – oops, perhaps they drafted a bit too much? BPA’s playing “hide the pea” and is running out of shells.

This is another new dashboard that plots the discharge from all of the California major reservoirs. There are more in the report; these are six we like looking at. Keswick has no storage, so its inflows are Shasta’s outflows.

If you thought the recent California rain would jack hydro energy, think again. All it seems to have done is put out the fires and increased stored water, a bit.

Coulee may have cut flows over the holiday weekend (weak loads?), but the folks at the NWRFC are suggesting a big surge is coming. Perhaps this is in anticipation of that cold weather? Surely isn’t from natural river flows, not enough rain.

BPA posted some TTC updates last week; the DC is going back to zero for a day or two while the AC’s capacity is cut in half on those same days.

Conclusions

Westcoast may have bumped flows on its pipe, but not that much made it into the USA. Sumas still lags last year, after the bump, by over a half a B. You’d have thought the entire outage was restored by what happened to Sumas Term Gas. We’d fade that correction and jump back in for some cheap length off of this cold weather, or at least that is what we’d do without looking at market prices, which is precisely what we’ll do in the next post to follow shortly.

 

 

 

Greetings,

I usually wouldn’t post late at night, but if it’s newsworthy, why not? We are seeing flows at Westcoast’s Station 4 gapping up:

Flows stabilized at around 650 MMCF a week after the explosion and have been on a steady recovery since. Beginning on Nov 9 and through Nov 19 (10 days) averaged 1,111 MMCF, or about 460 MMCF higher than post-explosion. Then this week things changed, flows increased another 200 MMCF to 1.3 MMCF. This is an ineresting level as it is identical to what flowed from Aug 10 to Sep 10, prior to the explosion.

This change can be seen at Huntingdon, the southern terminus of Westcoast.

The two plots are perfectly parallel and, like Station 4, Huntingdon is back to where it was for a month this summer. That doesn’t mean the pipe is back to 100%, note where flows were last winter, still 530 MMCF lower. Assuming Sumas takes half the haircut, that would put the total cut at 265 MMCF. However, that assumes more gas doesn’t flow, something we wouldn’t bet against.

So what’s happening at Sumas?

Flows are up, but not as much as at Huntingdon and the pipe is still receiving 500 MMCF less than pre-explosion and 700 MMCF less than last year’s peak. A couple of possible explanations why Sumas isn’t seeing the same rally as Huntingdon.

1. Lag – Perhaps Northwest Pipe hasn’t updated its noms yet, or is not as fast as Enbridge. If that’s the case, tomorrow we should see Sumas jump 100-200 MMCF.
2. Bogart – all new flows are going into Fortis’ service territory leaving the Americans high and dry. LOL, doubt, contractually, that can happen but we’ll know in a few days.

I’ll be watching this over the weekend, here is the dashboard of all of the above charts – Enbridge Explosion.

It is my opinion that if the flows are fully restored the largest correction in the history of  MidC will take place over maybe a day or two. Interesting, now that we are seeing signs of a restoration, fading the recent moves has become a more viable strategy. We still like selling the backend rolls; those are all miss-priced around $10-20.

Happy Holidays,

Mike

 

Good morning,

 

NOAA Forecast Images

Warmer than normal temps are blanketing the west coast this week though that trend spill as far east as Utah and Montana as well.  The following week looks less abnormal as temps differ from average by just a few degrees in most areas with Northern California the lone exception.

Precipitation Forecast

The West is looks wet this week, especially the Cascades.  Next week looks to bring more of the same across the entire WECC.

LMP Spreads

SP-PV showed a difference of $28 at their peak and $16 at their low yesterday.  SP-NP was much tighter with just $5 of difference at their peak and $4 at their low (with NP coming out higher for the latter).

Futures

Crude is still tanking after having dropped to $53.30 in the futures after shaving off another $0.70 today.  Gas is back to $4.56 after dropping two cents day-on-day, though the day had plenty of volatility with prices ranging from $4.28 to $4.66.

West Term Gas Prices

December Sumas fell a massive $5.37 yesterday after peaking at $17.97 on the 19th.  That still represents a $3.00 week-on-week increase.  January fell to $9.12, enough to once again fall below Citygate (which settled at $9.32 yesterday).

Gas Storage

Jackson Prairie storage has been running negative since the 3rd with reserves taking their largest hit on the 10th at -152 MMCF.

Spot Gas

Sumas fell to $9.69 well off its insane high of $69.25 on the 16th.  Malin finished at $5.63 and is continuing its steady climb after a 20% increase week-on-week.

Kingsgate is following a similar path as Malin as prices reach $5.45, a 50% increase week-on-week.

Mid-C Demand

Seattle is hugging the average line through the next seven days with just a handful of highs rising as much as three degrees above normal.  Same story in Portland, though much if its variance is coming in the overnight hours where temps are staying comfortably in the 40’s.

Loads were nearly identical yesterday compared to Monday though daily low demand was up 300 MW.  Peak hours followed a similar schedule and topped out at over 25,000 MW.

NP 15 Demand

NP peak demand was down 300 MW yesterday compared to Monday and was down more than 600 MW compared to the previous week.  Off-peak loads managed a 400 MW increase day-on-day.

San Jose is projecting highs in the mid to low 60’s for the remainder of the forecast, a far cry from the 70+ high we saw yesterday.  Watch for temps dipping into the low 40’s by the weekend.

SP-15 Demand

SP peak demand plummeted more than 600 MW yesterday at their peak, but overnight loads showed a day-on-day increase.  Week-on-week peak demand fell roughly 1,000 MW.

Burbank is looking perfectly mild moving into the weekend as temps top out in the mid-60’s.  Sunday shows a return of the 70’s with a high of 77 for each day Sun-Tue.

PV Demand

Phoenix is pacing six degrees below normal for its highs beginning tomorrow and extending well into next week.  Lows aren’t projecting that extreme but still dip four degrees from average in most cases.

Nuke Status

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

Gas Plant Noms

SP gas noms are up 140,000 MCF since the 17th while Mid-C noms are staying on roughly the same level during that span of time at 425,000 MCF.  WECC Interior showed a massive drop yesterday with a 330,000 MCF day-on-day movement.

Renewables

SP-15 solar has dropped 20% in generation over the past week as yesterday checked in at just 4,100 MW.  Each of the previous four days failed to top the 5,000 MW mark.

Mid-C wind is working with peanuts during most days of the past two weeks though the 14th and 16th each managed to top 1,000 MW.  The high of this week peaked at just 314 MW on the 17th while the following two days only managed two hours above 100 MW.

ISO Gas Outages

470 MW of gas outages were tacked onto the ISO total yesterday, reaching 4,733 MW.  Still well shy of the totals we saw in late October, however.

Hydro

 

PNW Reservoirs

Mica is still setting new 10-year lows as it currently checks in at 2,430′.  Hungry Horse and Arrow are reporting elevations slightly above normal while Albeni Falls remains at a low 2,051′.

Snow Anomaly

Here is another week-on-week look at how the snow pack is building, or in this case, isn’t building.  Aub-25% anomalies are creeping their way north through the Cascades due to a lack of early season storms coupled with mild weather.  The East side of the Rockies, especially in the north, are keeping pace so far this season.

Snow Depth Summary

Rocky Beach and Priest Rapids are the only two basins to show a week-on-week decline in snow depth, though each amounted to less than a tenth of an inch.  Still, just a handful were able to add more than 0.2″ over the past two days.  Upper Snake led the way with a 0.26″ build.

Snow Depth Chart

This water year is getting a bit of a slow start in the Upper Snake as it currently sits an inch shy of average and more than 4″ from last year.  2011 had a similarly slow early season snow build, but as the chart shows, it finished well above even 2018.

Transmission

 

BPA TTC

The COI line shows just one day-on-day change beginning at 1800 tonight and running through 1600 tomorrow as 125 MW is added to TTC.  The line is forecasting 325 MW lower than what was shown last week.

NOB isn’t projecting any changes from last week.

 

 

 

Have a wonderful day,

 

William

Good Morning,

 

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

Monthly

Energy Scorecard:

• November – Up 339 aMW
• December – Down 39 aMW
• January – Up 913 aMW
• February – Down 1,011 aMW

Massive moves on the back-end of the forecast once again this week as latest update essentially wiped out the changes we saw last week.  January projected a 913 aMW increase following last week’s 413 aMW drop and February followed last week’s 902 aMW increase with a 1,011 aMW decrease.  November jumped 339 aMW, marking an increase for the second-consecutive week, while December recorded a minute change once again with just a 39 aMW difference.

Daily

November’s daily increases max out at the end of the month, particularly the 27th where we see a 650+ aMW increase week-on-week.  While December didn’t show a large change in compared to the previous forecast, the dailies tell us that’s a result of a first-half increase wiped out by a second-half decrease (the 1st shows a 600 aMW increase while the 31st shows a 350 aMW decrease…all other dates fell somewhere in between).  January and February are almost mirror images of each other with January showing increases across the board and February showing significant drops for each day.

Year on Year

February and March are looking especially bleak in the latest forecast.

 

William

Good Morning,

We’ll resume today’s post by looking at the MidC term markets, both outrights and rolls for HL. These are reported in period order.

The WOW (Week on Week) is a good flag for finding the biggest moves, but we’re not looking for big moves in this post. Instead, we’ll just crawl the curve through the next year.

BOM’s about done and it is going out with a bang. Check out those heat rates, now its clearing at nearly a zero heat rate. Huh? The problem here is there are no fundamentals supporting these levels; it is all the fear of running out of gas. Given the warm outlook, which will take us through the end of BOM, there is no chance of cold-driven blackouts. Perhaps, over the long holiday weekend, these markets may soften up off of lower loads and maybe higher flows at Sumas.  I’d be inclined to short, as long as I was long the Dec.

All the collective fear and loathing is being pushed into Dec; this is setup to be a massive bust should Westcoast prematurely restore flows on its pipe. About the only way you lose shorting at these levels is cold weather and even though we see no cold today, I’d not even think about being short going into this long weekend.  If anything, I’d buy this and sell the Nov, but let’s look, not speculate.

Wow, there’s some volatility, especially in the heat rate. Makes you dizzy just looking at it. This isn’t cheap, that’s for sure; it was cheap when we put out our first buy on it ten days ago, now its kind of rich, but it kind of needs to be given all the uncertainty in Dec. If I had bought this roll ten days ago, I’d be more inclined to sell it, take the profits, and go into the holiday flat and happy.

Jan looks like Dec until you price it against the roll, which is what we did.

And now you see just how rich Dec truly is. I’d be tempted to roll length out of Dec and into Jan at these levels. This nasty warm weather trend has been in play for months, what if it continues well into Dec? I know what the market will do in that scenario – it will sell the Dec harder than the Jan and you’ll bank coin on being long this roll. The problem is cold weather; if and when it arrives the Dec will gap $50 in a day while the Jan moves up $5-10. Don’t see cold, so if you want some action buy the roll and camp out on weather channel over the long weekend.

Feb, like Jan, looks rich until you price them together.

This roll’s been all over the map, too; these are $10 oscillations; now its back to contract lows. If you think the pipe returns to full capacity early, you’d buy these rolls because they will pay $20.00. Your fear is cold, but further out that fear is diminished. I’d buy this one.

Pretty pricey and this is post-winter, usually. Does anyone really think Westcoast will keep its pressure at 80% for the entire winter? I don’t and would be tempted to short here, as long as I had some length in front.

Like the other rolls, at or near contract lows. Not sure I’d play this far back, I think there is more liquidity and volatility closer in.

Look at the price, it is still cheap – like $22 and the heat rate is off 2k. We are staring at a very dry year, though that can change quickly with a big storm. Still, this seems cheap.

A solid contract low on the roll to the Q1.  Any hint of restoration to Westcoast and this will soar $20-30 up …on a Q. Any hint of cold weather and it will plunge another $10-20. Russian Roulette with six bullets, anyone?

Q3 is rich, but it is a dry year, yet will it stay dry? Doubt that, not given the recent forecasts which suggest a changing of the guard. Still, shorting here is a risky play if it gets cold (cash will scream) or the pipe isn’t restored to full capacity or both.

The roll is at a contract high in a dry year; I’d be inclined to sell this, but you might need to be patient as it has been moving up for three straight months. That said, the odds of Sumas issues affecting MidC in Q3 are much lower than Q2 ..and it is a dry year.

Heat rate isn’t that high but the price is at a contract high, but then so is the forecast which confirms this is more fairly priced than not.

Wow, this looks miss-priced given that there is no Sumas influence other than mistaken hype; what drives this? Perhaps this reflects summer Socal Citygate issues more than Sumas; the bear market started last summer and its just been a steady sell ever since. One thing that might rally the roll would be a big water year but not seeing that today.

This looks cheap, at least relative to the forecast. I’d be tempted to own it and hope cash goes nuts and all ships rise in the flood tide.

There isn’t any reason that this roll should be trading at a contract low; Sumas won’t impact either strip; if anything, the Q1 might get more love than the four if Dec stays warm and the gas isn’t restored. I’d buy it.

NOTE on HOLIDAY – Ansergy will be open through Wednesday and closed on Thursday and Friday. We will post to the public chat if we anything interesting.

Good Morning,

It’s groundhog day, again.

Warmer in the load-center coasts and now its wet in the Northwest in days 1-5. Both will help a tight gas market; just imagine where spot would clear if Portland were in the low 20s! or Burbank in the mid-30s?

This dashboard inspired a new virtual – Huntingdon minus Sumas; this would measure the allotment of gas to the US; we noticed Fortis pulling a more significant share over the weekend. Check it out, Huntingdon receipts were up but Sumas unchanged all of which means Fortis was up. We’ll add that this week.

These Sumas term charts are crazy, now the back of the curve is starting to move which suggests the market is less-confident Westcoast will be back to normal by March.

Citygate, too, is a  bull in the LA china shop. There will be pain should the City of Angels (haha, if ever there was a misnomer) get cold. Well, it’s not looking cold in the next ten days, but the gas market hasn’t seemed to notice.

We’re writing about the Mid-C’s term market today, but had to post these Prompt Month prices; the MidC has not stopped to breath, it’s still climbing while Palo and SP pulled back a bit.

LMPs are off from Friday’s clears, except at NP which is up slightly; the bigger takeaway is the levels – all triple digits. Spreads between Palo and SP blew out in today’s DA market.

Socal’s receipts rallied hard over the weekend, but that isn’t because Wheeler Ridge is back; instead that bump is from a big draw in storage.

Nearly 400 MMCF was pulled, though the cuts at Wheeler were 600 MMCF. Socal’s site suggests Wheeler Ridge should be back to full capacity today, though we haven’t seen the flows in Envoy, yet. There is another outage next week:

This next one is smaller, just 550 MMCF, but lasts four days versus three.

We mentioned how warm it was; these plots underscore how cold it could be; that bottom line is the ten-year low by date; the green line is the ten-year average and the red line is the current forecast. Heck, most cities can’t even post an average, let alone get close to a min. Just shows how much-deferred load (gas and power) is at play.

These are degree day anomalies by city; note something odd. All the large population cities (aside from Denver) have negative anomalies, and all the tiny, hillbilly towns are positive. Not sure what moral lesson to draw from that observation.

Socal’s gas noms took a nosedive, but that’s probably because the Citygate price hit double digits and the ISO shifted generation to ZP. Also noticed that though Palo’s gas noms are off from summer, they are above last year.

A couple of big gas units have been taken offline for maintenance over the weekend (Pastoria and Mountainview). I guess that’s good timing given the fuel costs for each.

All that smoke is keeping the solar radiation from striking the solar panels and total solar production is off. It is going to come off even harder when Kally gets this rain that is heading its way. Also, the wind is nowhere to be found at any of the reporting hubs.

This is a new dashboard that we made off of the MidC Load and Resource table which incorporates two views. The top two compare the current week (the last seven days) against the previous ten weeks. The bottom compares the same week against the last ten years, same days of year.  Note how much more hydro is being generated than in past weeks.

Another new dashboard, this one warrants an explanation. The top plot is cumulative precipitation for the next five days; this is a forecast. Each date on the X axis was the forecast on that date for those five days. The purpose of this is to show how the forecast changes across time. The second row is days 6-10, same format; and the last row is the realized precip over the last ten days.

The above is for the Northwest, and we carved out three stations – the Flathead, Spokane, and Upper Snake. There are about 40 stations you can plot, click here to see those.

Coulee’s discharge is upward sloping, but that is just normal, though the current flows are approaching a ten-year high. That isn’t because of all the rain above the project; it’s due to the Westcoast pipe issues. Check out the L&R’s thermal cuts.

Some of that extra water coming out of Coulee is from a drawdown in the reservoirs; BC was already 2 MAF behind normal, now the US is falling below the ten-year average – and it isn’t even cold yet.

Peak hydro energy soared over the weekend as the ISO drafted its reservoirs to avoid those double-digit gas prices. Perhaps they feel more comfortable pulling water now that some storms are coming?

Friday’s Ten Day massively jacked Northwest flows adding nearly a gig of hydro, for a few days, then the forecast craters over the holiday weekend. Don’t think it suggests anything for today’s STP but the positive precip anomalies might incline the NWRFC to bump the entire strip.

DC is back, flows southbound started yesterday. Both the DC and the AC have capacity derates next week.

The DC mostly flowed test power; it should be back to normal by this afternoon.

Conclusions

Near-term fundamentals are bearish, warm and wet, but the gas cloud hanging over the market should keep the short-biased bears hiding in their caves. We wouldn’t short much without gaining some confidence in gas; we need to see higher flows at Sumas. Meanwhile, how long will this warm weather hold out? Once it gets cold, things could get ugly bullish. More on that in the next post.

Good Morning, again.

Part two is about the market, today we’ll talk about two dysfunctional hubs, SP15 and MidC, and the opportunities they provide via the spreads. These values can be viewed in our APT Report.

I’ll post the TradeRank charts in period-ascending order.

Aside from a volatile valuation, both heat rate and price, it’s hard, initially, to gain a strong opinion either way on the BOM spread. We know there is no demand at either hub today, but there are some hints the Northwest may grow cold.

Contrast the first seven days with the last; clearly the NW is going to see a spike in demand while SP doesn’t. Given the instability of Sumas and this cold hint, we’d buy the spread for size.

We’re always cash-biased; if we like the BOM it is hard to fade that sentiment in Prompt. The spread, though, is already cheap, so cheap it’s negative $11. Even so, we’d be more biased towards shorting than buying, as long as that cold weather stays in the forecasts. It is Friday, I’d wait to see what happens to weather over the weekend before diving in here.

Jan is cheap as well but just because the Citygate-Sumas spread is as well.

But everything at MidC is predicated on Westcoast not supplying enough gas to Sumas; what if they jack flows back to 100%? Though they’ve said that won’t happen until March what is to keep them from accelerating their timeline? It is this factor that will weigh more on the relative value of the spread than any other fundamental, and there is really no way to model it. Because of that, we’d be biased towards buying the back end of these spreads and selling the front. Our thinking is one week of unmet gas demand in Seattle/Portland/Vancouver and there will be immense pressure on Enbridge to turn up the spigot.

This one isn’t cheap, it is trading like there is no derate on Westcoast. Perhaps buy Jan and Sell Feb?

Same price structure as Feb; you already have the trade on in the Dec-Feb, we’ll pass.

The Q2 was at a contract high, now it is just high but this is shaping up to be a dry water year, those spreads should be coming in. For water reasons alone we’d short this, but toss in a potential inverted cash spread in the triple digits sometime in the next four weeks and we’d want to short it even more. Sell.

If you sell the Q2 I’d be tempted to buy the Q3. Typically, water issues are resolved by July, even in a wet year. The spread is rich, but it’s less than the forecast. Buy.

The Cal is a whole lot of VaR and seems you can get the job done with the bullets. Pass