CHP E-DAM?

Abby and Tim break down the first week of operations in EDAM, hydro availability in the west heading into summer, CHPE-driven volatility in New York, data center alley congestion, and the increasingly healthy nuclear fleet. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

And welcome back to Status Track, Grin Status' podcast, taking a look at the wild world of North American power markets. This is Tim Ennis joined by Abby Listina. Abby, have anything fun on the agenda? You know, anything, uh anything after the snow out west?

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Yeah, bright sunny skies after our little May snowstorm. Um, and that's great news for my friend who's getting married this weekend. So beautiful, uh beautiful weather in the forecast for uh the first wedding to kick off wedding season, it seems.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Oh boy, yeah. You don't have to mention that to me. I just had to spend more money than I want to ever spend again on a suit for my three weddings this year, none of them being mine, but we'll be uh yeah, definitely uh it's getting to that age. So it's always fun. Fun to go into the weddings, but uh yeah, time to tongue and bite the bullet and get a new suit. Yeah, I guess outside of uh fun weddings and things on on the horizon this weekend, what have you been uh keeping an eye out for starting this week with the first week of EDAM?

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Yeah, first week of EDAM. So very exciting to watch, you know, yet another market kind of come alive, you know. Again, not a full RTO. Um, so there's it's a little bit different, but we do have these new day ahead prices, these new day ahead price curves and like all the host of elements that kind of come with it. So it's been really exciting to watch. Um, you know, first thing, you know, that we've noticed in the first week is that, you know, Pacific Core is divided west and east. So we have like two BAs essentially, and Pacific Core West has seen some really interesting day-ahead curves. So, you know, normally day-ahead curves kind of like follow like load patterns as well as like net load patterns, you know, there's seemingly a rhyme or a reason, you know, aligning with power market fundamentals. And Pace West's day ahead curve has seen some like interesting volatility that doesn't always line up with what we would typically expect to verify in the day ahead curve. Um, but we have seen interesting, you know, patterns with the real-time prices. You know, the first day we saw this volatility was actually Sunday, and real-time prices in pace was actually tracked just like completely below what the day ahead cleared and didn't follow the price curve at all. And then we saw it again on Tuesday, I believe. And actually the real-time pricing tracked, interestingly enough, with some of those like price step-ups and sudden price step downs that the day ahead ahead curve had. So really quite interesting. You know, don't know the biggest driver of it right now, but we're just gonna keep watching, see if it's just how like, you know, the market's structured, seeing the intentionality behind it. But yeah, very interesting. Um, we've also seen some congestion in California driven by Pacific core ties. You know, prior to Go Live, you know, California actually, you know, noted this in, you know, parallel operations that Pacific core ties really impact binding on um Kaiso interface lines. So it's very interesting to see that kind of play out, especially in this first week. And I'm assuming that that will only increase um as we get into summer and higher load periods. So it'll be interesting to see like that added element um as well. And then yeah, I mean, Sunday midnight, Monday morning early, you know, California set another new wind record. So an additional 600 megawatts was added into the wind forecast or in the wind record for California. You know, we're seeing Sun Zia really come alive. And actually, California in their summer, you know, resource adequacy paper actually specifically mentioned Sun Zia for the first time. You know, it looks like that it was planning to come online May 1st. You know, we of course saw it like teetering online March, April, but we're seeing it come alive in stages, it appears. Again, Sunzia is 3,500 megawatts total. Um, so we're expected to see a bit more come online um between now and what I think California indicated as like the end of June. Um, so it'll be fun to watch um California re-break some of these records as more and more of these Sun Zia wind turbines um come online. So that's been fun to watch and yeah, fun to see. And fun honestly to get confirmation from California because you know, we we kind of were the whistleblowers for that here at Grid Status. We just noticed it like ticked really far up. And even though there was no public announcements, we were like, oh, wow, this might be Sun Zia coming back online. And um it's cool to see California kind of acknowledge that. As well as, you know, we saw that wind record get blown out and then minimal net load record for California Sunday, midday for you know, high solar and high um wind penetration. So that was cool to see. And then yeah, just you know, some some nuclear activity out west, you know, Palo Verde, second unit, is ramping up pretty slowly, but it's ramping up um after its refueling outage at the end of March, March 20th. I think it came offline. But we did see Columbia D-rate. Um it dropped about 600 megawatts. So just watching that a bit, you know, nothing too we're not really too concerned about Columbia. I'm sure it's just some maintenance. But yeah, just interesting to see that kind of drop off a little bit. So yeah, it's been super fun and exciting week for the West. What about you, Tim? Um, see anything kind of crazy out east?

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Yeah, I think in general it's been an interesting week. So I think staying on that nuclear route, you know, we did have Seabrook start to ramp up up here in New England. So it started to ramp up over the night on Wednesday, uh kind of fully ramping back up during the during the daytime on there. So it was a very quick ramp. So definitely kind of expecting to see that unit return uh back to the to the sack in full, you know, probably by the end of the week. Uh again, pretty, pretty quick ramp up there. Seabrook, for people kind of picturing it in their mind, right on the border of Maine in New Hampshire. So it's on New Hampshire, it's in New Hampshire, kind of near Hampton for my New England uh audience here, but uh definitely kind of helping to restore some of that that baseload capacity in New England. We've been down two out of the three nuclear units. So Millstone is still on outage, but we've definitely been missing some of that that baseload nuclear generation. It kind of took a look at that and just the number of negative price intervals have dropped very quickly with those units offline, as well as just some some volatility with uh Hydro Quebec. I think outside of that, you know, kind of staying up here in New England, it has been a pretty strong week uh for offshore wind. So we've been seeing a fair bit of wind activity primarily offshore. So we had pretty low wind speeds on Wednesday uh during during the morning, uh, but you had some very strong speeds offshore. So uh was you know basically all the wind generation in New England and a little bit of kind of the majority of it was coming from in New New York was coming from South Fork there. So definitely was you know kind of interesting to see. I think the big thing that, you know, kind of caught my eye and feeds into what we've been talking about a little bit is just some of the kind of lack of generation from Vineyard Wind. So Vineyard Wynn finished construction, they activated their PPAs with uh the Commonwealth Massachusetts and and our utilities here. But even though they have basically said we're done with construction, we're activating the PPAs, it basically means projects online and full. Generation didn't really reflect that. If the project was fully online, we would have expected about 800 megs from Vineyard and about 100 from Revolution. And we only had about 500. So that puts Vineyard at about half capacity. Revolution has about 10 online, we think. So about 100 megawatts from there. And I think one of the issues that we've been seeing, there's been some great reporting on this from the New Bedford Light, is just some ongoing legal disputes between GE renewables, formerly GE Vernova. They spun that into its own section just with commissioning the project, that there have been some electrical issues with the GE Halliade X turbines that are being used for the project that have been keeping full commissioning of every single turbine. You know, it hasn't happened yet. Uh so definitely kind of interesting to see there that again, we have almost double the amount of wind online. Um, pardon me, only 400 megawatts. Uh, but definitely was uh was kind of curious to keep an eye out on that. Uh and then we did uh get another look at coastal Virginia offshore wind. So we've been seeing basically we get new satellite images there every couple weeks. Uh and we got to take another look and kind of keep an eye on construction. So it looks like there are about 10 completed turbines there. And then we got the two pilots. So those two pilot turbines are 12 megawatts each. The new Coastal Virginia ones, those are almost 15 megawatts at piece. They're about 14.7. Uh so again, that puts it at about 150 megawatts of turbine or new capacity there. Does only look like one or two have been commissioned, uh, but again, you have a fair bit of capacity starting to you know come online piece by piece there. Did have uh Dominion put out their Q1 uh earnings reports. Uh, and then so in that there was a fair bit of the CEO talking, and I believe Utility Dive reported about this, uh, just in the in the conversations that you know they're pretty optimistic about the project, that it had been facing a lot of cost overruns. They've kind of gotten those on the control, uh, bit of impact from tariffs, etc. Right. And due to that, you know, and as they've been, you know, they started off installing pretty slow. Now they're speeding that up. They can get a turbine installed in pretty much a couple of days. So, you know, we're seeing almost, you know, two a week almost. So definitely, you know, we'll be kind of keeping an eye out that on that over the summer, uh, particularly just because in the summer the waves aren't as crazy. And again, we'll get some you know potential hurricanes, et cetera. But the big thing there is in the winter when you can have the winds blowing a bit stronger and get more choppiness, it can slow down construction. So definitely keeping an eye out on Colson, Virginia offshore. I think, you know, kind of stand up here in the northeast, definitely been seeing a fair bit of volatility in New York as well. So a lot of that seems to be coming from the Champaign Hudson Tower Express. They've been doing testing, they've been slowly ramping it up. And we talked about this last week that they've been slowly kind of increasing the amount of megawatts they've been flown on the line, and they've gotten to full capacity of over 1200 megawatts, but then they just shut it off. So you've been seeing these prolonged price spikes in New York because they've been doing these test flows and just the flow shut off. Prices spike, we've seen price spikes a couple hundred dollars, even price spikes well over a thousand dollars. So definitely kind of keeping an eye on the testing there and some of the volatility. And we even had some volatility in New York kind of middle of the week on Tuesday, particularly just with some congestion in New York City. Um, it was you know warm up here. It got into the low 80s in New York. Uh, you did have a fair bit of cooling load developed, but it doesn't look like we had the thermal capacity online, particularly in zone J. So you did have a fair bit of price separation. Energy prices were negative, but zonal prices in zone J uh pushed well over $1,000 a megawatt hour. I think the last thing uh we'll be kind of taking a look at uh Texas. So I've been listening to the new Casey Musgrave's album a fair bit, as I hope all of you are as well. Uh, and she has a song called Abilene. So I want to take another look at uh West Texas loads, so not far west, West uh West Tex. Um so you've been seeing this year during the shoulder season the impacts of the Stargate uh OpenAI data center uh that we wrote about in the blog starting to come to fruition that the load curve has just completely been reshaped due to that. It's flattening out just because those data center loads are flat. It was primarily residential there. We did have a little bit of commercial, but it's definitely kind of reshaped the load curve there. So uh definitely kind of something to keep an eye out for. There's a fair bit going on with the project, doesn't seem like expansion's going well, doesn't seem like things are going generally well for OpenAI to begin with, but uh definitely, yeah, a fair bit more load to come online there. So we'll be keeping an eye out on that. But I'm Abby, it's you know a little bit of a kind of a little bit of a crazy week on the East uh kind of keeping an eye out on that. Um anything you're keeping an eye out out west next week?

SPEAKER_00 12:38

Um yeah, I think you know, my eyes are kind of focused on summer. You know, we've seen a lot of that, like those summer reliability reports kind of pop up from those ISOs. And, you know, one thing I'm looking at is um hydrogeneration in the West, in the Pacific Northwest, you know, so we had, you know, really minimal precipitation um this winter. And, you know, a lot of these um hydro facilities and reservoirs, you know, really lean on that snowpack. So, you know, snow falls um and as it melts, it flows into these reservoirs, you know, provides this hydrogeneration. And since we had such mild precipitation this um year, you know, we have less snowpack to melt into these reservoirs. So that becomes a concern. But not only that, we had, you know, a really early heat wave in March that melted a lot of this snowpack early, you know, it melted, you know, 20 to 30 days, you know, earlier than it does on average. And so you have this interesting dichotomy. You can look at reservoir levels right now and you're like, wow, like they're really, they look really healthy, they're really high. Um, but that's because all this snow melt, you know, melted early and filled these reservoirs like earlier in the season that you would typically see. So I'm kind of, you know, I'm watching hydro for the summer, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, where um, you know, the snowpack equivalent is how they're measuring this, um, is pretty low. And, you know, current weather kind of shows like above average temperatures for the Pacific Worth Northwest, as well as like lower than average precipitation levels. So it'll be interesting to watch the Pacific Northwest this summer, given, you know, these you know lower uh reservoir fundamentals and like riskier fundamentals as terms of weather is concerned. So um, yeah, very interesting. I'm gonna be watching that. You know, I touched on Sun Zia, we saw another record break break. Um, and so you know, we're also looking at like what Sunzia is gonna look like for this summer. And so, you know, supported their resource assessment and you know, they have limited imports in the evening peak. So hours ending 17 through 23, I believe. And despite Sun Zia being counted as wind in the Kaiso grid, the transmission rights aren't completely open for the entire project. So that evening peak in Kaiso um will still be somewhat constrained. You know, we have 1.3 gigawatts of battery that's supposed to be added um before this summer. So that will really help out that evening peak, um, just especially since, you know, those KAISO batteries tend to be four hours compared to like the two-hour discharge we see for ERCOT. And then, you know, interestingly enough, you know, we might not see any high-risk set situations in California until September. So September is actually like the highest risk month uh for California. So that's a bit of a ways away. But it's just um something to think about, you know, as we move into summer and get excited for um, you know, summer peaking seasons and things like that. Um, and as we move out of spring. But yeah, I mean, I'm just gonna keep looking at EDAM, try to like, you know, get some patterns associated, look further into like what's going on in the fundamentals. I'm having a ton of fun watching, you know, how you know Pacific Core West and Pacific Core East kind of differ just because they have such different fuel mixes, they're having such different day-ahead price curves clear, they're having different real-time performances. So yeah, just watching all of that and watching it all play out is um super been super fun. And I can't wait to do it for another week. So nothing crazy on my docket. I always say that, but how are things looking for you, Tim?

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Yeah, um, yeah, I'll say the same thing, maybe nothing too crazy at the moment, uh, but definitely you know, some things to keep an eye out for. So you mentioned Seabrook uh ramping up in New England. Uh definitely kind of keeping an eye out for Millstone. They went out at similar times, so uh keeping an eye on that unit. Again, we're getting towards the middle of middle of uh kind of middle of late spring, if you want to call it that. So starting to you know see see some potential for generation to start coming online. That'll definitely be uh you know helpful here in New England. It's still been pretty cool. We haven't seen you know anything too crazy temperature-wise. So uh it would just kind of help to keep some some downward pressure on the supply stack and definitely help to display some therapy natural gas, which uh has really filled the gap here in New England when uh when the nukes went off and then uh with with some volatility with Quebec. Uh, I think outside of that, you know, it is Mother's Day on Sunday, and uh, well, I won't be with my family. I'll be traveling down to Baltimore for those at the PJAM members conference. Uh say hi. Uh, but definitely kind of keeping an eye out for on on load there. So we have seen marginal demand under performance due to Mother's Day in P Jam. Yeah, took a look at the past six years. It's nothing too crazy. More it amplifies probably just some weaker daytime temperatures, but a little bit of some potential downside there due to the holiday. Definitely, you know, would recommend kind of taking a look at that post. And you know, you do see how other holidays can kind of you know uh lead to demand underperformance during uh specific intervals in a holiday like Mother's Day that's you know not associated with trick-or-treating at night or leading to school and business closures can you know kind of mute some of the some of the bearish impacts that we see. I think the other thing I'm kind of keeping an eye out for is just more volatility in PJM, uh, particularly at the end of the week. So uh as we kind of called out last week on on the podcast, we had some Elmont outages in PJM that went out. Those drove a lot of volatility, particularly with Lady Smith Circuit Breaker, and then had a fair bit of volatility uh in in Data Center Alley. And then next week we have some outages going out on the Bow Mead 230 KV network. So we had another bow mead outage earlier this week, drive Pleasant View Transformer to bind so heavily, even drove AUX Transformer. Then we have more Bow Mead outages going out next week. So definitely some potential for some volatility coming back in Dominion, kind of second half of the week as the models are kind of indicating pushing back up into the 80s. Uh so that'll definitely be something to keep an eye out for. I think the big you know variable will be if we had the solar generation for it. You kind of see the eastern half of Virginia basically just goes negative flowing up into data center alley. That's where, you know, I think sort of the biggest variable is if we have the temperatures in the solar, we're in store for more volatility down in Dominion. So definitely uh, you know, some potential for some some sparks at the end of the week. But outside of that, just getting to the end of shoulder season and and things kind of getting a little bit healthier before we get some some volatility. Probably, you know, a month from now, we'll be uh we'll be getting close to summer. So crazy, crazy to think we've you know escaped uh the memory of Fern and getting back into the memory of the East Coast heat wave last summer. So yeah, we'll be uh be looking forward to that. Anything else you wanna hit on, Abby? Are you just ready to get over to that wedding?

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Yeah, looking forward to a nice weekend. Um that's it for me. Thanks, Tim.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

Perfect. Alrighty, everybody. Good uh good chatting with you, Abby, and we will chat with you all again next week. Enjoy the weekend.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Bye everyone.