Growing

After all the winter storm excitement in recent weeks, themarket appeared to be growing calmer Wednesday yet still managed tokeep pushing prices higher. Most of the upticks were between anickel and a little over a dime, with the Northeast remaining thebastion of dollar-plus increases.

Southern Company opened its new energy trading floor in Atlantayesterday, establishing the electronic nerve center of thecompany’s growing body of North American assets.

One of the nation’s largest and fastest growing municipalutilities, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) Tuesdaysigned a multi-million-dollar five-year deal for 150 MW ofpurchased power from Calpine Corp. Terms of the agreement werebeing kept confidential. The deal starts in the summer of 2001when Calpine’s first new natural gas-fired merchant generationplants in Sutter County begins operations about 50 miles north ofSacramento in northern California. Now under construction, theSutter plant is the first of a series that Calpine and othermerchant generators are planning to build in California over thenext five to ten years.

Growing weary of waiting, BP Amoco and Atlantic Richfield Co. hope to step up the pace of their ongoing merger procedures by restarting the required 20-day notice period, suspended Nov. 2, at the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The companies concede the FTC has concerns about their pairing, but the merger partners said they don’t agree with the issues raised by the commission.

Growing power generation and LDC demand for gas have promptedPeoples Energy and The Coastal Corp. to team up to develop a130-mile gas pipeline from Indiana to Wisconsin. The pipe, aimed atincremental growth markets, is intended to serve electric powerplants and local utility growth markets in northern Illinois,northwestern Indiana and Wisconsin beginning in late 2001. Initialcapacity will be 1.4 Bcf/d. According to the North AmericanElectric Reliability Council, the region will need more than 8,200megawatts of additional generating capacity by 2005.

Dynegy Inc. yesterday announced plans to develop its firstmerchant power plant to serve the growing electricity market inFlorida.

HS Resources, based in San Francisco, is further growing itsposition in the Wattenberg Field area of the Denver-Julesberg Basinby buying Houston-based Kinder Morgan’s gathering system therealong with its interests in the Amoco-BP Wattenberg Gas ProcessingPlant and KN Wattenberg LLC, which owns the Wattenberg transmissionsystem, in a phased transaction.

One of the nation’s fastest growing nonutility power plantdeveloper/operators, Calpine Corp., San Jose, CA, is taking ahands-on approach to building a diversified natural gas portfolioto fuel what it eventually hopes is a network of highly efficient,environmentally clean combined-cycle power plants with a collectivecapacity of 25,000 megawatts.

Dynegy Inc. told FERC last week it’s becoming alarmed at thegrowing number of varying Y2K contingency plans being filed bypipelines. The Commission should agree to allow one set ofprocedures for the entire industry, Dynegy suggested. Otherwisethere could be a state of panic on New Year’s eve when shippershave to deal with multiple sets of Y2K emergency nominationprocedures.