ISO NE -- What's Going On? -- September 29, 2021

10:44 p.m. EDT -- posts / screen shots. The actual data lags about one hour.

Electricity rates just spiked on the east coast.

Link to ISO NE.

In the past hour or so, real-time rates have moved from $70/MWh to over $105 / MWh.

For newbies:

• $20 / MWh: when demand is low; renewable energy supplying max available
• $30 / MWh: pretty normal expectation
• $70 / MWh: very high rates
• $100 / MWh: expect to see this with high a/c demand; high heating demand
• $200 / MWh: rarely seen

Fuel mix chart:

• for some reason percent of demand met by natural gas has dropped way off and expensive Canadian hydroelectricity is surging:

• natural gas: 53%
• nuclear: 29%
• 11% hydro
• renewables: 6%

Holy mackerel: a refresh shows real-time costs have spiked to over $200/MWh. 10:51 p.m. EDT. This is autumn; not hot summer weather and not cold winter weather, and yet coming on midnight, electric rates are surging.

Folks think charging EVs overnight will not be that big a deal.

Graphics:

 

 

Note: the screenshots were taken at the time indicated but the actual / real-time data was one hour earlier, at 9:50 p.m. EDT. 

The original graph below had to be redrawn to more than double the "y" axis to capture the $200+ spike in MWh price.

Later: rates quickly dropped to $100 / MWh after the above screenshot. A reader follows this much more closely than I do and probably has a good explanation. The thing I'm trying to point out is the overnight charging of EVs is going to be a bigger deal than most folks realize. EV penetration in New England is negligible.