Friday, February 5, 2021

Did "They" Run Out Of Oil In New England?-- February 5, 2021

Charts like these suggest New England ran out of oil. Are they burning coal to keep the grid from crashing, but not burning coal?

Prices spiked to $150 / MWh and pretty much stayed there all day:

6 comments:

  1. is it possible that the power plants that could burn oil are due-fuel and can also burn natgas? (i know New York City had some duel-fuel oil plants but im not sure what the alternate fuel is in that case. its probably not coal)

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    1. You may be correct; I had simply not noticed that before. I normally see 5% oil before I start seeing coal. It's unimportant, just a trivial observation.

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  2. per my earlier comment. see this article from a couple years ago.
    https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/ggt2tesxwkjjn6ywbogcng2

    Note that a lot of the plants were described as switching from natgas->oil becuase gas was in short supply. Maybe there's enough supply to keep burning natgas (although New England is awful about new pipelines, there has been *some* construction since 2018)

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    1. Wow, what a great article from the "archives" -- 2018 --. Thank you for finding that. Very, very interesting. And despite that, still not a lot of interest in building more natural gas pipelines. I find all of this so fascinating. Thank you for taking the time to look this up and then taking the time to write me, much appreciated.

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  3. Pipeline constraints is the problem. Take a look at the NEISO for July 19th 2020, demand was 22500 MW, NG generated 13000MW for a cost of ~$30/MW.

    Yesterday demand at 10am was 16300, cost of `$150/MW due to fuel cost.

    NG, $2.86/MMbtu, heating oil $1.71/gallon. Takes about 7 gallons of oil for 1MMbtu.
    About $12 for the same heat using oil, vs. $2.86 for NG.

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    1. To see the other end of the spectrum:

      http://themilliondollarway.blogspot.com/2021/02/fascinating-when-hydro-isnt-needed-iso.html.

      When demand plummets (weekends), the price of electricity trends toward $0.00.

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