Nation

For now, California and other parts of the nation can thank Mother Nature for saving consumers from severe and sustained summer energy price spikes, and perhaps bolstering the political resolve to keep pushing ahead with market-based energy solutions, said a Wall Street analyst with Commerzbank Securities. However, the market fundamentals are still present to sustain higher-than-historic prices and volatility, particularly for natural gas.

Pennsylvania faces the very real threat of being dethroned as the nation’s leading model for electricity choice because skyrocketing wholesale power prices are pushing state customers to abandon electric choice in favor of default providers, according to the Center for the Advancement of Energy Markets. As Pennsylvania stumbles on the road to electric deregulation, Texas, Maine and New York are all making impressive strides in promoting sustainable competition among electricity providers, the center said.

Ever-expanding San Jose, CA-based Calpine Corp., one of the nation’s fastest growing merchant power plant developers, Tuesday bought another 236 Bcf of natural gas reserves through two purchases–one in the San Juan Basin in New Mexico and the other in South Texas. This brings Calpine’s gas reserves to about 1.5 Tcf, with a goal of having 6.7 Tcf in the company’s portfolio by the end of 2005 to support an almost exclusively gas-fired fleet of plants totaling 70,000 MW of output.

The nation’s largest municipal utility, and one of the public sector bulk power suppliers that has made some money supplying power to the rest of California recently, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is reassessing its natural gas strategy for its fleet of in-state power plants in and around the LA Basin.

U.S. natural gas production and the nation’s vociferous demand could make it a little more dependent on imported gas if a recent long term forecast by a committee of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) holds up. Natural gas demand is expected to increase to 30.7 Tcf by 2015, while U.S. production is only expected to get up to 24.8 Tcf over the same time period.

The nation’s leading maker of microturbines, Chatsworth, CA-based Capstone Turbine Corp., and the on-site generator part of Columbus, IN-based Cummins Inc. inked a three-year deal that could be worth $10-15 million during its first two years. Cummins will market Capstone’s commercially available 30 kW and 60 kW microturbines as part of its stationary power systems. The deal seeks to marry Capstone’s technological advantages with Cummins’ worldwide market presence.

In a race to produce increasing amounts of natural gas to keep up with the nation’s growing demand, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. reported last Tuesday that it is continuing its work to find and produce new gas reserves from oil fields. The company announced its Fife Unit #2 well in Central Texas, which just came online, is producing natural gas at a rate of 51 MMcf/d.

This summer will not be a particularly hot one, but there is a chance that there will be some abnormal heat waves in specific regions, especially in the West, New York and New England according to a national weather assessment by esteemed energy weather forecaster Jon Davis of Salomon Smith Barney. The SSB forecast, which takes into account Sea Surface Temperatures (SST), precipitation outlooks and soil moisture, as well as historical data, raises new hurdles for an already crippled California.

In a race to produce increasing amounts of natural gas to keep up with the nation’s growing demand, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. reported Tuesday that it is continuing its work to find and produce new gas reserves from oil fields. The company announced its Fife Unit #2 well in Central Texas, which just came online, is producing natural gas at a rate of 51 MMcf/d.