Weekly Power Outlet US - 2025 - Week 9

The EIA natural gas storage report didn't disappoint as 261 Bcf was pulled in the week ending February 21. This was right in the middle of estimates and has now put the lower half of the 5-year minimum for gas storage within in a pitching wedge. Last year that this time, gas levels were setting the top end of the 5-year historical range. Natural gas has pulled back from overbought levels as the concern for early March cold has faded with below normal temperatures still possible, but another ice bowl unlikely.

Wednesday PJM put out a press release talking about how the board has approved new transmission to support reliability. Buried toward the bottom of the note was this tidbit. PJM revised the cost to shut down Talen owned Brandon Shores coal and oil plant in Maryland. Interestingly, the cost is going from roughly $740 million to $1.5 billion. The plants were scheduled to shut down this spring, but have been given new life to the end of the decade. According to a Power Magazine article earlier this year, Talen will be guaranteed $180 million a year in fees. These included negotiated and extended capacity payments.

This plan needs to be approved by FERC, which should make for some interesting debate.

When we started the WPO a few years back, we were aware that compute power was a thing and that its growth was inevitable. That said, we have to admit that a Wall Street analyst commenting on Microsoft's data center spend, and the company's response would be front page news stuff for the electricity world was on our bingo card.

Monday, the semiconductor analyst team at TD Cowen released a note talking about some lease cancelations by Microsoft and other possible scale backs related to datacenters. Microsoft hit the finTV airwaves to let everyone know that wasn't the case and all was normal. By the time the dust settled, Microsoft's message was something along the line of, 'we aren't reducing datacenter spend, we might just move it around to different projects.'.

Wednesday night, Nvidia cleared it all up for us. They released numbers for 1Q25 with datacenter revenue of $22 billion. That was a 23% rise from the previous quarter and 427% from the same quarter last year. For now, it appears datacenter spend is alive.

NOAA WEATHER FORECAST

DAY-AHEAD LMP PRICING & SELECT FUTURES

RTO ATC, PEAK, & OFF-PEAK CALENDAR STRIP

DAILY RTO LOAD PROFILES

COMMODITIES PRICING

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