Summertime, and the living is downright hot–finally. Moderate to severe heat was uniform in all areas for a change Monday (even up into Canada, where a Calgary source reported afternoon temperatures in the mid 80s). The cash market responded with across-the-board gains that were mostly in the teens.

The daily weather map in Houston’s newspaper was a sea of orange, red and brown shadings representing highs in the 80s, 90s and 100s respectively. The big question was: Is this the start of widespread sustained heat (emphasis on “sustained”) that many have agreed for weeks would be the key to arresting the general price slide that began early last spring?

A regional utility buyer indicated that at least the Northeast will be an early dropout from the heat derby. He admitted being kept pretty busy Monday buying for gas-fired peaking generation units, but said the Northeast is expected to drop back to the 70s Wednesday “and it should be nice and comfortable here” for quite a while after that.

To a Gulf Coast producer, just losing much of the Northeast demand so soon will put the kibosh on any budding bull market. Sure, the South and Midcontinent/Midwest are likely to remain sizzling this week, he said. But a Northeast cooldown will remove a key load factor, especially when the producer and others concur that “there’s still a lot of gas running around loose out there.”

Nevertheless, at least for Monday many suppliers were getting more calls from power generators than they had seen prior to this week. A marketer said demand was especially strong in the New York City and PJM (Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland) service areas. There was a popup in prices during early trading while the screen was still mildly supportive, he said, but things started to settle back as the screen started turning negative late in the morning. Ranges were pretty tight at first, the marketer said, and only widened out in late deals.

The lack of an OFO allowed PG&E citygates to rebound strongly from Friday’s triple-digit plunge, racking up Monday’s biggest advance of about a dollar.

The scheduled finish of Tranwestern’s Lipscomb/Mocane Lateral outage today will put an extra 80,000 MMBtu/d of capacity back on tap Wednesday in the Southwest.

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