Memorial Day Cool Down

With Abby out this week, Tim is joined by a special guest, Co-Founder and Head of Strategy at Grid Status, Connor Waldoch. They discussed how markets dealt with high cooling load in the East, power flow dynamics in New York with the addition of the CHPE, ERCOT’s large load forecast, and the evergreen topic of the impact of data centers on electricity rates. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to Status Check, Grid Status's podcast, taking a look at the wild world of North American wholesale power markets. This is Tim Anish, and today I have a special guest and joined by head of strategy and co-founder of GridSatus, Connor Laldock. Connor, how does it feel to be uh on grid status uh on status check for the first time?

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Longtime listener, first time caller. Happy to be here in an official sense and not just on all of our long weekly internal calls trying to figure out what's happening in the markets.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Exactly. We're we're happy to have you. You know, Abby uh is on the ground in uh in BPA this week, uh maybe doing a little on-the-ground reporting, who knows? Just getting in the way of land before uh some market changes out there. It's been uh yeah, quite a week. We're we're excited to have have you on the podcast. Guess with that in mind, you know, what have you been kind of keeping an eye on this week and sort of just in general, you know, a little bit of a shift from our traditional uh space here. But what's uh been on your mind?

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Yeah, I mean, if you're you know, if you're listening to Status Check, hopefully you're also an avid reader of insights. And you won't see my name there nearly as much as Abby and Tim. You know, they're really holding down the fort and posting through it, as the kids say, um, through all the grid events, right? So often I'm kind of thinking at a higher level. I will say the heat, which I know you're gonna get into. I felt like Memorial Day came a week early this year, uh, given the terrible weather that most of us are gonna be experiencing on Monday. Uh, but in terms of you know, the larger stuff I'm looking at, it's it's hard to get away from data centers, both in the sense of what the data center industry is themselves is putting out, they're they're reporting on whether or not they have any price impact or could have any price impact. Uh, get more into that. And, you know, the impact on the markets directly. Er cot saying, hey, we understand that our load forecast was pretty ridiculous. So here's another load forecast that perhaps only looks feasible in the light of the utterly infeasible, you know, tripling, quadrupling of demand in a in a few short years. Now we only need to increase it by 50%. Um so, you know, been looking at that, tracking that, thinking about how markets are gonna evolve, what new products they need, will, you know, will the regulatory side be able to hold up under the pressure of the first major concerted load growth in a long time. No, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

It's a lot, a lot going on there. It's you know, one of those of kind of, you know, as as somebody like yourself who's a PGM repayer now, it's you're kind of happy that those forecasts aren't in a market like PGM that's feeding into the capacities market. But uh, I mean, PGM has their own issues with their uh their long-term load forecast that we've uh that we've hit on before.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Yeah, I think structurally there's a lot of things that have and haven't happened over the last five, ten years. See interconnection queue reform happen, but you also see a freeze, right? You see PJM start to lead the battery rush a decade ago. Um products get changed in the market, battery yearly batteries burn out, and now they're pretty much at the bottom of every other market in terms of battery deployment. Uh in a market with uh with these large electronic loads, data centers, they could use some real fast resources. Um, but it's it's just not there. So, you know, when I look around and see uh, you know, look look to the north, it's Pennsylvania and see some of those PPL load forecasts and hydro disappearing into PPAs from hyperscalers and everything going on. It's uh yeah, I I do think about my monthly bill as a longtime PJM ratepayer.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

It'll be uh interesting to see, you know. It's it's funny, like ISO New England, small market, 500 megawatt peak battery discharge and uh yeah, PJM just uh a few states away, can't can't really add anything. And yeah, and then at the same time, you have a PPL saying that they'll have a almost a New England size edition of large loads by the end of the decade will certainly be uh something that can be not that far away.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

This is coming to you on uh Friday in mid mid-2026. So three and a half years to go. But yeah, it's definitely uh yeah, dynamic, you know, uh time there.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

But yeah, but speaking of dynamic, I mean, I know you were tracking things in PGM real real closely this week, given everything that I saw you posting in insights and just you know, in internally as we were talking about it.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

Yeah, no, it was uh quite the quite the week and definitely was a great time to kind of have some of the features that we added last summer that you know, something that we've talked about internally of just you know, oh, this would be great if we had insights back in June of last year and in some of the features that we've added, like say the leather radar, uh, has definitely been, you know, come paid off this week. So I think, you know, as many people who are listening, and actually a lot of people might have actually lived through uh if you were kind of used to the Mississippi this week. Uh, we had record-breaking temperatures really just across the entire Eastern uh interconnection. Uh it peaked at 97 degrees Fahrenheit here in Boston on Tuesday. That tied the highest springtime uh temperature ever uh in recorded history here in Boston. Uh it was uh quite quite the week, but uh yeah, really high temperatures uh across the I-95 corridor, really just getting us to some pretty pretty high peaks. We peaked at about 136 gigawatts on Tuesday in PJM. So definitely uh quite quite the volatile week. Uh say really being started off too with uh some volatility on on the nuclear side. So had a fire at the uh generator at Fermi. Uh so Fermi to uh where? Yeah. Yeah, right. Uh kind of southeast of you know uh Detroit. It's always one of those, you know, Michigan, hold out your hand. It's like, all right, do you have your left hand out? Kind of track your thumb a little bit on the on the coast of Lake Erie there. Um not to be confused with the you know uh under pressure falling apart uh data center development in Texas. Yeah, yeah. It's uh one of those, maybe don't name yourself after uh uh after a uh a plant that already had a partial meltdown uh back uh a couple decades ago. But yeah, had a fire at a turbine uh generator there, uh led to a manual scram. Actually did see the unit start to ramp up uh on Friday, which definitely came as a bit of a surprise there. It was already it was 100 megawatts and starting to cook a little more, right? Yeah, very, very quick. Uh and that was after they had been offline for a bit, were starting to ramp back up from their refueling outage, and then you have the fire at the generator, two days, you know, offline coming back, which usually takes, you know, I feel like a lot of the times you tend to see about a week after these scrams are are issued for it for them to ramp up. So definitely uh interesting to see there. And and you know, at the same time, did have limerick return in PJM. Uh so again, it's sort of a double-edged sword there of great, you have this uh generation coming back online, so self-scheduled, coming back from outage and came as PJM was dealing with high generation outages and this highly concentrated load along the I-95 corridor.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

And you mentioned earlier, right, we're talking a peak load in the 130s, which you know doesn't sound crazy when you're several tens of gigawatts below peak demand, but it's May. It's not July, it's not August. We're we should be exiting, and we are exiting shoulder season, right? But I imagine even outside of these kind of unexpected outages that, you know, more high profile these nukes, that the sort of the background rate of outages were high, right? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Yeah, we we were picking out about 43 gigawatts this week. This was after PGM issued. This is still PJ. Yeah. Okay, yeah. PGM issued these maintenance outage recall alerts to bring try to bring back some of that generation, some generation alerts. And you still had 43 gigawatts of of generation outages uh in PJM. Again, sort of, you know, the metric that we've talked about is well, if you have 136 gigawatts of load, and on top of that, you effectively have 40 plus gigawatts of generation offline, you know, sort of to you know put things in into perspective how much pressure is on on the remaining generation fleet. Uh so yeah, just you're getting close to you know high 170s there of just generation plus outages on on Tuesday.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

So this is something you know that we've been looking at and we've been talking about, right? Is it's obviously it's it's not a new concept, but with the shift of risk to net load peaks, particularly in markets that have an advanced penetration of renewables, and the variability and weather that comes in the shoulder seasons, which are traditionally, and I even traditionally still are the outage seasons, right? It becomes even more important to track these two together because we really need to understand what's available on the system and what the stress looks like as sort of total demand. You can think of demand as not just the power demand, but like what's out, right? Like what is what is the portion of installed capacity that's not in the slack, right? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Yeah. And then on top of that, too, beyond generation outages, you had you know just bounds of transmission outages as well that also complicate these flows of multiple 500 kilovolt lines offline in Virginia that just really on top of famously uncongested Virginia. Exactly, exactly. You just keep just keep adding data centers, please. It'll eventually figure itself out. Uh and yeah, you just had these multiple uh 500 kilovolt line outages. We've talked about some of the uh, you know, the drivers of the Lady Smith circuit breaker outages or congestion, had outages on the Elmont 500 kilovolt network kind of in central Virginia. And that you know, continued to drive this strong congestion in data center alley. You had multiple nodes in data center alley peaking well over uh $2,000 a megawatt hour, both in the day ahead, but in the in the real time as well. Uh so yeah, continually.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

We've seen a lot recently of those day ahead prices not materializing in the real time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Yeah. You did have some, you know, some days had some overclear uh around the peak, uh, partially with just energy prices, but yeah, really pricing in a lot of that congestion uh in in PJM.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

You think that uh congestion up the gut of Virginia through Richmond is uh gonna get any better when coastal Virginia offshore wind starts coming online?

SPEAKER_01 10:40

Yeah, no, that'll be uh you know something to keep an eye on. Those nodes have already been getting kind of destroyed. Uh and we looks like we only have the one turbine online. It you know, had a had a new image actually this week that showed about 14 completed turbines there. But uh yeah, definitely uh adding 2.6 gigawatts there. Doesn't seem like that's uh gonna be great uh on some you know sunny, mild days in the in the spring.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

And you know, at the top we mentioned, you know, weather's not necessarily great right now. And you know, I anticipate that that led to some interesting outcomes as we transitioned away from the heat and PJM, particularly this big east-west market. A lot of issues moving power from one end to the other. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

We had so much uh, you know, we had a lot of uh precipitation kind of coming with this event. So I think one thing I think it's worth noting is up here in New England on Tuesday, again, which was the day that had the highest temperatures here in Boston. Uh it was a very kind of interesting start to the week. So we started off on uh, you know, it's something I felt because I was like, all right, we got open all the windows and lock in as much cold air as physically possible before the heat comes. So we had this onshore breeze coming in off the Atlantic into Boston. So you could see some price volatility else, you know, in in across ISO, New England, because if you just drove 40 miles or w uh west of Boston, it would be in up into the mid-80s. But in the city itself, it was 62. It literally it smelt like low tide. Like you could literally felt it like you were down the cape or something. But and we get this a lot in Boston where, you know, in a lot of these coastal areas where if you the winds are right, the ocean will act as a kind of moderating force, uh, you know, will help to, you know, reduce some of the extremes in the summer, but also keep things a little bit warmer in the winter. So we had this kind of help uh in ISO, New England on Monday. Again, it stayed at about 62 degrees all day in Boston while it was you know up into the mid 80s in Worcester. I think you also had this on Wednesday in PJM, where you had uh breeze off Lake Erie kind of helping keep uh Cleveland and you know, kind of surrounding Cleveland Metro much cooler. Then you also had that over in Chicagoland as well, where temperature feels like temperatures were you know down into the 40s, um, just with that, with that breeze coming off of Lake Michigan there. But yeah, with that, you had so much precipitation kind of pushing through PJM. So had a cold front come through during the day on Tuesday that continued to kind of push east during the coming through on Tuesday.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

That's you're talking about starting in Chicagoland comic.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Yeah, yeah. You had the you had Chicagoland kind of got hit evening peak on Monday, and then kind of continued to push through the RTO on Tuesday, and then it got really into the I-95 corridor around five o'clock on Wednesday. But that just basically meant you had four days where the I-95 was just baking in the in the high 90s. Uh, and that just you could see that the temperature and demand gradient that formed from that, where you know Wednesday was a comparatively very low RTOY peak. It only peaked uh, you know, a little under 120 gigawatts, but you had Dominion actually hit their highest five-minute peak interval during the entire event, was on was on Wednesday. And that's where you had explosive congestion, where you know some of this coal generation, likely along uh the Ohio River Valley, it's old, it's really inflexible. You can't just hey, you know, hey uh Mount Storm, turn off.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

Uh you're telling me that it can be tough to move power into northern Virginia from elsewhere in PJM when there's a spike in demand.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

You know, I hate to break it to you, Connor, but that is uh exactly the case. Yeah, had a lot of congestion as a result of that pricing update of Central Alley. Uh also had some congestion in Del Marva in the Del Marva Peninsula, which uh as as Connor knows was actually the first uh kind of blog that you know kind of took the lead on here, uh, talking about some of the the volatility that we see in the Del Marva Peninsula, especially kind of related to the retirement of Indian River uh coal plant down in in southern uh Del Marva.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

And then I told you, Tim, this is your first blog at grid status. We got to put a twist in here. Let's talk about chickens. Chickens, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

Yeah, big big Purdue. Uh really uh really uh contributing to those to those winter demand peaks in in Del Marva.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

But yeah, but it's uh I mean speaking of winter demand, right? I mean, one of the things, again, from the like a little higher level, or like really like what's the wonkiest thing you could imagine in these markets was the the uplift in PJM out of Q1, right? Um I think there's no better signal for how hot energy and energy markets are right now than the fact that there was a Reuters article about uplift in PJM, like quarterly uplift. Um, you know, I I spent a number of years at one of the independent market monitors in the US, and I spent a lot of that time thinking about uplift. We cared about uplift, the the markets care about uplift, these out-of-market, inefficient payments that are like not in the system. Um, your you know, you have your day ahead bid production cost guarantees, day ahead margin assurance payments, you know, all these wonky terms, which basically like, hey, we had to do something that moved a plant off of its schedule and you know, we're gonna pay them, right? Every morning at 8 a.m., they're on the ops calls with with the market teams saying or with the teams internal to the ISOs, like, hey, what could we do to reduce this uplift or not have it happen again? What's going on there? Right. Not something you see in the news, but when it's a billion dollars in one quarter and PJM's already under fire from all these angles, um, you know, I think that that billion dollars to put into context was about the previous two years. Uh, and we saw chalk point, right? A plant that you look at plenty here here in Maryland, a single plant accruing $200 million in uplift in a single quarter is just kind of unbelievable. You know, my little my old market monitor heart aflutter um to to see something like that. Well, more like an anxiety attack, but it's it's just so interesting. And I think it really speaks to the times, right? Of what's even possible to to staff a reporter or like a journalist on at something like Reuters, which is just covering in the news generally, is is crazy. And I think we're only gonna continue to see more of that for the for the foreseeable future. Like when I think about all of this, I started my career in energy 15 years ago, or when I finished grad school, it was not a sexy field. Um, and today it's kind of top of everyone's minds. It wouldn't say I'm fun at parties, but people at least ask a follow-up question, and I I appreciate that. Um and it'll be really interesting to see what comes out of each of these events now. We saw again, right, with this this PJM heat wave, we saw another like emergency DOE approved order where you could have stuff, you know, data centers turned down essentially if you needed to, and you know, doesn't I don't know if they hit that threshold of actually needing to. I don't think so.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

No, it was yeah, they're preventing the EEA three, they only ought to EA one. It's like sort of one of those where it's I think you there is the political case of during Fern to be seen to be productive. And maybe on the margins, you had some of these operators again, not out of the, you know, maybe market need, but maybe more so this we're gonna be a good grid citizen. Yes. We uh you know, get it get ahead of some potential headlines uh to put on my poly sci major hat uh to you know be, you know, to you know, play it play along with the politics a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

But I mean that's the tough part right now, right? Like you can see the public opinion is turning sharply negative in a lot of cases. Um, like recent commencement speeches in particular, uh, you know, talking about AI and data centers. And you you mentioned uh when you were at the members meeting, you know, you have a PJM board member get up there and say, like, well, we should all pay for this because we all use AI. And then, you know, getting into the the specific engineering, like, we don't know where one megawatt is going to another, which is really interesting to me. I've I've been pondering that, um, not only because you know, that PJM board member was one of the slots, he filled one of the slots that Virginia and Pennsylvania wanted someone else in. They wanted a former FERC commissioner in, and PJM said, no, we're gonna take a professor who doesn't live in PJM and put him on the board. But that specific statement really uh made me think about the way that these big tech companies that, you know, these fat software margins, right? They made all this money on that. Now they have to get a little more into the physical infrastructure game or a lot more into the physical infrastructure game. And you go from caring about the characteristics of a megawatt hour, like, is it green? You know, we're trying to meet some annual, maybe hourly matching at the best level requirement for renewable or zero carbon energy, to like, no, we really need this megawatt hour because it's so valuable for us. Um, but at the same time, you know, someone in PGM being like, well, you can't count, you know, one megawatt hour is another megawatt hour. It's all on the same grid at the same time, you know, which is true. But realistically, if you are exposed to price pressure from any of this, it's gonna feel bad. And what's really struck me, I kind of started to mention this up front a little, on some recent, recent studies, you know, coming out of, you know, a fair number of them are sponsored by advocacy groups for data centers or, you know, in let's say industry groups, real consulting firm sponsored by X. The the look back covers a period where there just wasn't an issue. You're you're aware, I think most people are aware, that in a bunch of these markets, the peaks are had been well in the past, damn 20 years ago. And that out speaks to a system that has, well, now had Slack, right? So if you're then looking at like the period 2019 to 2024, you're looking at years which well, whatever was connecting was connecting into Slack. When you talk about load growth, not happening in most places in that period. And where it was happening, say Virginia, data centers. Yes, that is the industry that was connecting in Virginia, not exactly the same data centers as we're talking about today in 2026. And then in Texas, oil and gas into some crypto mining, but again, not the hyperscaler data centers that we're talking about today. And I just find it really interesting that there's these discontinuities in trying to compare this stuff that get glossed over. People go, oh, they can or can't raise rates. When you're talking about specific conditions, right? Specific conditions to North Dakota's oil and gas boom that kind of like leveled out, dropped a little somewhere between plateau and decline. You build infrastructure for that, you increase the capacity of internal generation by 30, 40 percent from 2014 to 2024. There is Slack to interconnect into there, which you know, Bitcoiners uh found when China banned mining there, right? They found a home in North Dakota, they found a home in Texas. So, yeah, I'm a little consumed with just trying to connect all of these different threads that lead to where where costs can come from, what is happening, how things can be designed better, and where they run into these administrative snafuos that have been developing for a long time, right? In PJM and elsewhere. So, you know, it's not the uh, hey, here's what was happening on a particular constraint and PJM is the weather hit this week, but it's what are we gonna be in in three years? Um, and you know, how can we analyze that and build stuff to make it easier to understand?

SPEAKER_01 22:49

Yeah. Yeah, it will all have day-to-day implications as we saw this week with uh with that concentration of uh dozens of nodes seeing thousand dollar plus pricing, uh that all just happened to be uh just attached to data centers. Just who over there.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

I think one of my favorite things is is the the Southern Virginia bit now. Yeah. Where uh you know, a little behind the curtains, I was I was driving down to North Carolina for something a couple months ago and saw this massive new substation I hadn't seen before on that drive. I'm like, whoa, what is that? And I'm like, oh, there's a data center there, and Tim's already mapped the node because he's on top of that, and it's uh it's Microsoft, right? And now you just see a completely different price pattern than you used to. Uh, it's just like cluster of nodes on the border of North Carolina and Virginia down there. And it's, you know, it's not a mystery that something changed in that area and prices have changed. That's the whole point of the market. You're trying to direct investment to these areas. So, you know, high prices are, you know, there's there's the solution to the problem, uh, as you know, people like to say, a solution to themselves, but there are limits to what people are willing to bear, right? Like ERCOD's an energy only market, but also they cut their, you know, they cut their uh bid cap in half after URI.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

It's gonna be, yeah, it's uh a lot of a lot of stuff coming down the line. And it's uh, I don't know, it feels like, you know, for lack of a better term, you know, sort sort of the dam's gonna break that, you know, these markets are under a lot of stress and you know, a lot of uh a lot of high interest between hyperscalers and you know, the political side of the White House kind of getting involved and sort of some of the, you know, maybe uh, you know, maybe not super above-board deals that we've been uh we've been seeing there with uh between you know some of the hyperscalers and and some uh financial interests. But we'll be uh curious to see what uh what ends up happening there.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

So I've sort of spiraled uh spiraled us off a bit off of your uh you know typical takes here. But uh what are you looking forward to you know through the weekend and the next week?

SPEAKER_01 24:59

What's going on? Yeah. No, I think I think you know, in general, you know, excited to get a little bit of a cooldown here, see how the stack reacts. I think honestly, what I think one of the big things I'm gonna kind of keep an eye out for is any sort of updates we get on the New England Clean Energy Connect. So I think as people probably are are aware, uh, and if you're not, I have a great blog on uh uh grid status exports on the new tie lines between Hydro Quebec and New England.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

Last uh November, right?

SPEAKER_01 25:28

Yeah, yeah. And um one of those lines, the first one to come online was New England Clean Energy Connect, uh interconnects up in Lewiston, Maine, up here in New England. And so this is about, you know, we tended to see about 1100 megawatts of pretty flat flows when the lines are uh active. And so on Tuesday during the hottest day in New England, mid-afternoon, line went from 1100 megawatts to zero. So prices react, prices went up to $400 megawatt hour, kind of capped there up until we had some demand disruption due to the storms. And then the next day was still zero. Mid afternoon, kind of late morning, and started to come back. Then a couple hours later, boom, mine went back to zero on uh on Wednesday. What was phase one doing during this? Phase one was pretty, pretty flat. And uh phase one ended up ramping up uh flows to about 800 megawatts during hour ending 20, hour ending 21. Yeah, yeah. So they were they were it was flat to you know maybe 200 megawatts of uh flows into New England. And on on Tuesday, you saw kind of the the largest uh ramp and flows on that line into New England, uh, but still not matching the the flows on face on the NECUC. So definitely, I think, sort of any sort of clarity we can try to get on what the drivers of that were. This is also after, again, the line was commissioned back in at the beginning of January, ahead of Winterstorm Fern. Then it actually went on a week-long maintenance outage back in April. And now we've had two unplanned outages in a row leading into New England's peak season. So it's definitely uh something to keep an eye out on about sort of what what the potential drivers of that are and general sort of the reliability of those flows from Quebec in into the summer.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

I think it's been really interesting to watch some of the early CHPE, so the Champlain Hudson Power Express in New York in this yeah, Chippy. In the in the same context, right? You know, again, why didn't they call it champ? Like we got a cryptid right there. Um you know, I I used to work very closely on on NISO, you know, with the market monitor, and so spent a lot of time thinking about Central East, right? It's this interface that's like a big constraint when you think about like the eastern half, which obviously includes downstate, the city area where that's the largest, most concentrated bit of demand. And then the the west and the north, uh, where there's wind and there's more hydropower. You have Niagara, you have St. Lawrence, you have you know these big facilities that the you know, like the state's policy goals are such that they would love to flow more of that out directly into the city, but you know, you run into the congestion on the central central east interface and you know, chippy. Think like, oh, okay, it's going straight down Lake Champlain, Hudson River, right into eventually uh Astoria interconnecting there. And I could perceive that as just it's hey, it's Hydro Quebec, it's hydro, it's you know, it's coming up from HQ or coming down from HQ. What's been really interesting though, as we talked about in the same blog that that Tim mentioned, is just the reversal of flows from New York into Quebec over the last couple of years. And now I'm kind of thinking about it a little differently, where instead of just, hey, these are new flows, some of the time in these early tests, there's enough flowing from New York into Quebec, just I don't know, a couple hundred miles or so to the west, that it's almost more of just looping back around, skipping central east, right? So you're not getting, you know, you got Moses at her on deck going down there. And instead of getting congested on that corridor, flows going into Quebec, they're coming back down the Hudson. Um, and you know, realistically, both sides will tell you these are separate, separate transactions, I'm sure, and they are. But it's hard to not balance that out in your head and just think about hey, was this just an easier way to move power, some power that was already in New York down there? Uh again, no one's gonna say that officially involved, but when you look at the balance, you know, if it evens out, what else is it? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

Yeah, we New England just, you know, just a few weeks ago finally had more megawatt hours uh from Quebec this year, even with the new tie line than than the year prior. So it's uh you know, margins are are kind of continuing to tighten there. But uh definitely, you know, sort of uh an early conversation in my days at grid status with uh saw that lake eerie lake eerie loop flow, then it all just comes back to these loop flows basically.

SPEAKER_00 30:01

Every time I talk about uh Lake Erie circulation, that's when people's eyes start to glaze over and I have to, you know, again, not a great party trick. Phase angle regulators are uh not I love talking pars. Michigan, Ontario PARs critical. Uh again, not something people want to hear about.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

But yeah, I think I think, you know, I don't know my golf terms, but I think we're I think we're below par. I think. We'll see. I I couldn't tell you, I think. Yeah, I don't know.

unknown 30:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:33

But yeah, anything else, you know, catching your eye, Connor? Or are just excited for uh for a long weekend?

SPEAKER_00 30:39

Yeah, it would be nice to have the long weekend. I am constantly struggling with uh all of the various ways that Kaiso likes to report renewables. Uh been looking through a lot of that recently with everything happening there from EDAM, Sun Zia, all this different stuff. And yeah, it's you know, you can you can go through their data and see like five different day-ahead numbers for wind and solar across all the different reports and everything in Oasis. And so, you know, I I try and do a lot of as much of that uh back breaking data work so that Tim and Abby can keep producing great uh great insights.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Exactly. And yeah, I think it feeds into you know part of the reason you uh you have found grid status is uh this data is out there, but it's uh not easy to get and definitely not easy to uh understand uh most of the time.

SPEAKER_00 31:29

Yep. Well, uh, you know, thanks thanks for having me, Tim. I'm sure I'll be back on again one day.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

Yeah, looking forward to it. Uh yeah, looking forward to the to the you and Abby special when uh I don't know, maybe when uh when I go up to Nova Scotia or something. That'll be a fully West Coast experience. Looking forward to it. Yeah, some some education for uh for some of our East Coast uh audience, including myself. Love talking to Hydro. Yeah, well stay tuned. Maybe we'll uh we'll have some more hydro content coming your way. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, thanks for coming on, Connor. Yeah, excited for uh for a long weekend. Yeah, to keep uh keep going through some of these uh these larger movements in the market with you. All right. Sounds great. Thanks, Sim. Have a good weekend. Thanks, everybody.