Thursday, February 25, 2010

Close to the edge of the woods

I had a written ministerial answer that demonstrated that gas was being exported from storage. The minister rightly pointed out that some gas was imported from Holland and other gas exported to Belgium.

In a sense we are now in a typical situation. Commercially if anyone takes the risk of reinjecting gas into storage they also face the risk of either keeping it for a year or selling it at a loss.

At the same time we cannot be certain what the weather is going to be. Normally it would not be that cold from now. Hence no-one seems to be reinjecting gas.

On the other hand the weather forecast at netweather now is a bit coldish. However, we cannot be certain that this will either be true or indeed last.

Hence the country faces quite a big risk. It is one of those situations where the importance of the risk is high, but the probability of the risk low. However, the cost of taking preventative action (viz having some stored gas) is actually not that high.

However, this risk is something the market should take as a whole for reasons of energy security rather than individuals taking the risk on the basis of a calculation as to whether or not they will make a return.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Warmer Weather reduces pressure

The country is not out of the woods yet, but the warmer weather today (and tomorrow) is reducing the pressure on the gas system.

Medium Range Storage is at a new low, however.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

MRS patterns following export from storage

2010 02 21 mrs
The engineer inside me does not like this. The purple is todate (up to 6am this morning). There should be some reinjection today, but actually there should have been more than 0.64 mcm yesterday.

The GBA Trigger is now 428.7 mcm/d.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Trigger should be 400 mcm/d

What is missed from the trigger adjustment is that non storage supply is running at around 30 mcm/d below its estimated amount of 363 mcm/d. Hence in fact there should be a lower trigger.

However, given that we have 2 days SRS and 2 days of much of MRS there is quite a bit of leeway. The problem with this, however, is that the system has a tendency not to respond to problems when there is a real problem.

The next 7 days look coldish if not really cold (from NetWeather).

I will know better at 5pm on Tuesday whether an Urgent Question is called for. That will give Tuesday morning's storage figures at 6am.

It still looks like we are exporting gas whilst taking gas from MRS. This is the "perfect storm" that was warned about.

Gas Balancing Alert Trigger down to 428

With all the gas taken from MRS we now have two more sites below 2 days of stock at full rates. That takes them out of the GBA alert trigger level.

This comes from exporting gas from storage.

It may be that there is sufficient of a reinjection today to take the Trigger back up, however.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Netweather's 16 day forecast

The link is to the current forecast from numerical models of the average temperature across the UK.

At the time of writing it looks as below, but that is recalculated every 6 hours and if you click on the link it will probably look different.

The weather below (if that is what we get) will challenge the energy systems of the UK, but it is not at all surprising if we get something different. In fact that should be expected. How different is unclear.
2010 02 18 weather

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

MRS at 29%

Although it looks a bit cold for a week according to Net Weather and NSS is relatively low it looks like the system will scrape through until the end of next week.

It is, however, really risky to have a system that exports from stored gas when there is no real certainty that we have enough provision for the winter.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

MRS being exported

What has been interesting about the most recent movements has been the export of gas whilst withdrawing gas from Medium Range Storage.

That is the sort of thing that causes me to have engineering type concerns. MRS is now down well below 50%.

Netweather are indicating low temperatures, but the system should be able to cope this week.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Rough out and NSS low over the weekend

The Non-storage supply has been quite low recently. Today when demand is not that high gas is still being taken from MRS. The weather forecasts point to colder weather next week which could mean we are topping up SRS, but that won't be clear until Monday.

The long term storage is out as well. Hopefully this is not a long term outage.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

MRS used at 400 mcm/d

Medium Range Storage is being called upon today. That is with demand at 400 mcm. In theory with 363 mcm/d of NSS and 45 mcm/d from Rough there should be no call on MRS.

The link is to net weather's 16 day forecast that they kindly produced for me. This indicates some relatively cold weather for a week and a half.

MRS is relatively low at the moment, but it depends where things go this week.

Lets hope that Troll is not a problem.
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