Regulatory moves, rate cases, capacity market shifts, and competitive supply developments across every major U.S. ISO. Curated for the people who actually trade, schedule, and manage energy portfolios.
November futures fell 2% to $3.043 on a lower near-term demand forecast. LSEG sees Lower 48 demand at 102.6 Bcf a day this week and 105.1 next week, and temperatures stay near normal through Oct. 14. Storage sits 2.4% above the five-year average, down from 2.9% a week ago, and the Mountaineer XPress outage is over.
October gas fell 3.2% to $3.095 after a weekend nor'easter gutted regional heating demand. Northeast spot prices dropped under $1 per MMBtu, the lowest since 2022, with New York and Mid-Atlantic points also at multi-year lows. Columbia Gas lifted the Mountaineer XPress force majeure Sunday, so the supply scare is gone too.
November gas slipped 2.2% to $3.038, through its 50-day moving average, once Columbia Gas found the West Virginia leak and the 1.8 Bcf/d disruption faded. Milder Midwest and East Coast forecasts cut early heating demand. End-October storage is tracking near 3,985 Bcf, a decade high, and Thursday's EIA print is the next catalyst.
Rep. Frank Pallone sent FERC Chair Laura Swett a letter asking that data centers cover all the grid costs they create, that the new-generation requirement be made permanent, and that a data center registry go public. He puts the capacity cost increase tied to data centers near $30 billion since summer 2024. It's pressure, not an order, so the price direction is unsettled.
NRDC argues PJM can't hit the goals of its backstop auction and large-load proposals unless states act. It wants interruptible service tariffs, capacity obligations for large loads, incentives for data centers to add batteries, and tight limits on diesel backup runtime. Illinois is furthest along, and Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania are flagged as the most urgent.
ERCOT average load is forecast at 66.6 GW this week, down from 68.55 GW, while wind is expected at 13.5 GW versus 9.2 GW last week. Gas burn is still high near 30.3 GW, and year-over-year load growth holds around 4.5%. The read is soft prices this week on lower load and high wind, even with solar down.
FERC rejected the transmission owners' rehearing request and held its decision to cut the base ROE to 9.57% from 10.57%, with refunds back to 2011 worth roughly $1.5 billion. It leaned on a recent D.C. Circuit ruling that backed eight years of retroactive refunds in a MISO case. Lower transmission returns trim a pass-through cost, but the owners will likely keep fighting.
Columbia Gas finished the West Virginia repair that had threatened 1.8 Bcf/d, and updated forecasts turned milder across the Midwest and East, so early October heating demand is gone. Output is sitting near 110.6 Bcf/d, rigs hit a three-year high of 135, and the last 53 Bcf injection left storage 2.9% above the five-year average. LNG feedgas slipped to 18.5 Bcf/d. Supply is winning, and $3.087 is the level the bulls need to hold.
NYSERDA picked about 1.7 GW in its first bulk storage round: 950 MW of four to eight hour lithium-ion batteries plus 719 MW of solar, wind and hydro. Key Capture has 94 MW in Ulster County and 150 MW in Suffolk County, and Neoen has a 140 MW, eight-hour project upstate. Nothing runs until the end of 2030, but a second solicitation is due by year end and the state wants 3 GW total. More long-duration storage flattens the peak that NYISO buyers pay up for.
A new Environmental Protection Network report says pollution from data center generators could add about $21 billion in health costs by 2028. It points to three federal moves that make it easier to run them: a looser EPA rule on temporary turbines, an EPA letter letting backup units join demand response, and a DOE emergency order that lets PJM call on data center backup generation when the grid is stressed. That's extra peak supply on paper, but the air permits and the pushback are likely to decide how much of it ever shows up.
Trump rejected Iran's seven-day proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend, so Persian Gulf LNG stays disrupted and the call on U.S. cargoes doesn't ease. Front month gave back 3.7% Monday morning but held the $3.11 shelf, with $3.20 and $3.27 the levels to beat. Tight global LNG is what's putting a floor under Henry Hub right now, not domestic weather.
October ran into a 100% ABCD projection at $3.367 and the top of its rising channel, then printed an inside day. The $3.07 to $3.09 shelf is where this gets settled, and the 20-day is about to cross above the 200-day there. Hold it and the June high at $3.418 comes back into play. Lose it and the advance off the August lows is in question.
Judge Chutkan ruled the EPA killed the $7 billion program without statutory authority, and she set aside the agency determination for every grant, not just the one Harris County sued over. That puts roughly $250 million back in play for Texas distributed solar, $54 million of it in Harris County. More rooftop and community solar behind the meter is load that never shows up at the hub.
FERC rejected Oklo's complaint after PJM dropped its 750 MW Virginia project, 150 MW of advanced nuclear plus 300 MW of fuel cells and 300 MW of gas, from the current interconnection cycle in early August. Oklo says the delay runs at least 18 months and raises costs. Five other developers have the same complaint pending. Supply that can't clear the queue never shows up in the capacity stack.
Henry Hub spot averaged $2.93 from June through August, 6% under last summer, even though the Lower 48 posted its hottest July ever at 77 degrees. Production ran 2.7 Bcf a day higher year over year, and solar added 19.4 BkWh with wind up another 9.3 BkWh, so gas burn only grew 7.5 BkWh. EIA still has end-October inventories at 3,985 Bcf, 5% above the five-year average.
October gas gave back 1.9 cents to $3.004 a day after closing at its highest since July 8, even with Lower 48 output tracking to an 11-week low of 108.4 Bcf a day on Louisiana and West Virginia declines. Weather turns near normal through Oct. 9, and LSEG cut next week's demand call to 103.3 Bcf a day from 108.0 this week. That forecast, not the supply side, is what's setting the tone into October.
Climate Adaptive Infrastructure committed up to $268 million at SMT's parent level, on top of $32 million already in. SMT runs a stack of Texas batteries including the 160 MW/320 MWh Houston IV that came online this month in six weeks. Energy Vault separately picked up a 2.3 GW portfolio from Goshe. Every one of those megawatts shows up in the hours a REP pays the most for.
Members elected Janet Dietrich to the Board of Managers, effective immediately, filling David Mills' old seat through May 2027 after he took over as president and CEO. She spent 13 years at Macquarie running energy transition strategy and Americas corporate sales, with a background in wholesale and retail markets, trading and risk. The seat gets filled while FERC's end-of-September governance deadline is still live.
Attorneys general from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Delaware and California filed three complaints on Sept. 22 over lease buyouts with Invenergy and Bluepoint Wind. The Maine filing puts it plainly: paying developers to walk away restricts supply while demand keeps climbing. About a dozen leases have been bought back for roughly $4 billion, and the Gulf of Maine pair alone was 3.8 GW.
EIA printed 53 Bcf against a 76 Bcf five-year norm, the sixth below-normal injection in a row. Surplus narrowed to 2.9% from 3.7% and inventories sit 4.2% under last year. November cleared $3.150 and short covering took it through four levels to $3.377, up 5.8% on the day. Production also slipped to an 11-week low.
TC Energy's Columbia Gas Transmission declared force majeure on Mountaineer XPress after a pressure reduction on Line 100, zeroing the MXPSEG MA42 constraint from the Sept. 25 timely cycle. About 1.8 million dekatherms a day of firm service is affected. DT Midstream had already cut Stonewall deliveries into West Braxton the day before. No restoration date, and Appalachian takeaway is where the winter supply comes from.
The PSC's Sept. 17 order gives electric, gas and water utilities 60 days to file a complete inventory of AI use cases plus the policies around them. Regulators flagged hallucinations, algorithmic bias and cybersecurity as risks to critical infrastructure. National Grid is already using GridCARE to free up interconnection capacity for large loads. Nothing here moves price yet, but it tells you where the compliance work is heading.
Michigan is among the states looking at performance-based ratemaking, which ties utility profits to outcomes instead of capital spend. Stakeholders told Utility Dive the mechanics matter more than the label, and badly designed metrics just move the money around. For anyone selling into these states, it changes the shape of the delivery charge over the next few rate cycles, not the commodity.
DOE is funding 31 projects in 26 states that add about 23 GW of capacity without building new lines, using dynamic line ratings, sensors and reconfiguration to route power around congestion. Recipients kick in another $3.35 billion. Congestion relief is the cheapest megawatt there is, and anything that moves more power across existing paths pulls congestion costs out of a REP's delivered price.
Sept. 21 was the 500th day since 2018 when midday demand on the ISO-NE system fell below the overnight low, and the 107th this year alone. About 7,000 MW of behind-the-meter solar is installed now, more than five times Seabrook's output on a sunny day. That's load walking off the wholesale system every clear midday. The catch is the sunset ramp, which still needs gas plants that don't start quickly.
FERC rejected ComEd's notice of cancellation on the transmission security agreement behind a 1.8-GW, $20 billion data center in Joliet, sending the credit fight back to district court. Commissioner LaCerte called the $1 posting an embarrassing legal fiction. The load stays in the PJM queue for now, and 1.8 GW that doesn't get vetted out is 1.8 GW competing for the same capacity.
October pushed through $3.026 and November ran 2% higher on a Commodity Weather Group forecast that keeps the South-Central hot through Oct. 6. March is up too but still stuck under its 50-day at $2.929, so the curve is paying for air conditioning, not for a winter shortage. Thursday's 50 Bcf estimate is the next test, with end-October storage tracking near 3,985 Bcf.
EPRI's Jackie Baum told a panel in Albuquerque that microgrid resources should be shaving peaks and holding voltage during normal operations instead of waiting for an outage. Data centers above 50 MW are pushing projects toward transmission-scale connections. PNM says it has roughly 40 MW of balancing headroom while proposed data centers on its system run to 300 MW, which is the gap that has to close before any of this shows up in prices.
Risk360 covers power scheduling, gas nominations, settlements, load forecasting, and market intelligence. 50+ years of combined energy operations experience behind every decision.
See how we work →We monitor more than two dozen sources across power and U.S. natural gas: trade publications, ISO newsrooms, regulatory filings, gas market desks, and regional energy reporters. Everything gets classified by market, scored for relevance, and analyzed through the lens of the people who actually trade power and gas.
Generic energy news doesn’t tell you what it means for your book. We filter everything through the lens of power and U.S. natural gas operations, because that’s what we do.
Every story gets read for what it means to your book. Headroom and cost stacks for power suppliers. Henry Hub, basis, storage, and LNG for gas marketers. Not general industry news. Your news.
Each article gets a sentiment score: bullish, bearish, or neutral, scored from the seat that matters. Power stories through a retail supplier lens, gas stories through a marketer lens. See what’s moving the market at a glance.
Filter by the markets you actually trade. PJM, ERCOT, ISO-NE, NYISO, or pull up just the U.S. natural gas cards. PJM capacity drama doesn’t matter if you trade gas. We let you focus.
Want this intelligence on your desk every morning?
Our managed services teams use these same market signals to manage client portfolios. Headroom Intel takes it further with competitive positioning and margin opportunity alerts across 41 utilities.