Harsh

Even if mother nature plans to be unusually harsh on North America this winter, the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) said power customers can rest easy because power generation capacity margins are “adequate.”

Citing harsh economic impacts on the national economy from the post-hurricane run up of natural gas prices, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) Thursday sounded the call for “a second national energy bill” from Congress that would open up parts of the outer continental shelf to drilling. NAM’s President John Engler, the former governor of Michigan, said the manufacturers support a bill from Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA) to lift the drilling restrictions.

While harsh winter weather had already receded in much of the West and was due to do so to varying extents in the South and Midwest, it was still making itself at home in the Northeast. The result was a continuation of Northeast citygate spikes Tuesday, while the rest of the market either recorded considerably more modest gains or saw declines setting in at quite a few points in the West and Midcontinent.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), a harsh critic of FERC, has called on the Commission to purge its web site of what she claims are pornographic e-mails written by Enron Corp. employees. Federal rules ban employees from even looking at the kind of material that FERC has published on its Internet page, she said.

New bouts of harsh winter weather approaching after a brief respite, the end of a holiday weekend slump in industrial load, suspicions of a large storage withdrawal to be reported Thursday, and sharp spikes in the energy futures complex (especially among the petroleum-based products) all combined to generate large rebounds at nearly all points Tuesday.