Achieving

The cash market once again displayed amazing resilience in achieving increases — most of them fairly substantial — at all points Friday. In doing so, it swam against the negative tide of milder weather returning to key northern market areas, prior-day screen weakness, a highly bearish storage situation and the usual decline of industrial load over a weekend.

Moody’s Investors Service on Thursday downgraded the debt of AES Corp., citing concerns about smaller future dividends from subsidiaries, weaker power prices and “deteriorating conditions” in international markets were the company holds substantial generation interests. The downgrade affects about $20 billion of debt securities, and Moody’s warned that AES will remain on review for another possible downgrade.

While eastern markets meandered around in a generally flatperformance Monday, the West was achieving significant gains ofabout a nickel or more. Topping the list was San Juan Basin, wheresupply outages helped drive quotes up by about 15 cents. Prices inthe Rockies, Pacific Northwest and western Canada also were strongdue to cold weather. It snowed in Calgary Monday morning, onesource said, adding this is late in the season for snow but not arecord for Calgary.

Despite achieving named tropical storm status Wednesdayafternoon, Frances was unable to avert a slight softening of cashprices. Several Gulf Coast pipelines were losing supplies toshut-ins, but the volumes were on a significantly smaller scalethan those attributed to Hurricane Earl last week.

Although often seen as effective vehicles for achievingcompetition, pilot programs also are being used as a “delayingtactic” by some natural gas and electric utilities that aren’tbullish on the idea of bringing customer choice to their markets, amarketing official charged last week.