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Cool stuff you're doing as a student, hope you get some answers.

 

Hard to say, if believe you are an actual “student”, but ehh I will bite a bit. 
1) How do you know Tetco-M3 is a suitable market?

2) If Tetco-M3 is suitable, where is this plant actually located? Why not just check wikipedia and see the actual HR the plant needs to run.

3) After 2, why not seek if that city/state has more gas/elec driven heating/cooling. Now let’s see which month has most extreme temperatures.

4) Look up eia api; Wholesale Electricity and Natural Gas Market Data

 
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Wanted some insight or if someone could explain to me for a presentation I am doing for school. Want to do a spark spread for my energy trading class. What are months for PJMwest was thinking Tetco M3 on peak for a month that are most profitable

Was thinking using heat rate of 7 as my entry point but if someone could explain what happens if the heat rate soars (good or bad for my idea) would think since I'm hedging, yeah would lose on my downside but potential soars could offset any loss with nat gas price increases given more demand or other factors.

Also open to if you think somewhere like ERCOT or CAISO would be better for a spark spread

Would love some input! It has to be a future trade idea.

Impressive if you’re actually learning about sparks as a student. Curious what school/program if don’t mind mentioning?

Were you given a power plant to manage the exposure around or you’re just trying to think up a trade idea or what exactly are you presenting? You wouldn’t really care about trading a spark unless you were dealing with an underlying generation exposure. Not really a “trade idea” you’d put on on its own if that makes sense yeah? More so something you’d have to take into account when trying to determine the hedge ratio of power/gas contracts to sell against to manage the exposure and also calc your breakeven fuel cost of the plant. (I.e is it profitable to run or not)

If you weren’t actually given a plant with a corresponding HR you could just trade a market Heat Rate (I.e power/gas spread) which seems like what you’re wanting to do irrespective of having an actual generation exposure.

If you’re looking at PJMW in general M3 would be most correlated basis market on gas side. If your plant is located further west in PJM something like M2 or DOMSP could also work.

Calc out HR/sparks historically and look at what periods they typically spike/are typically highest is there an overall trend etc. When is this and why do you think?

 
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A lot of WSO posts confuse me a little bit, but what on gods green earth are you fellas talking about? 

 

If you want to go long outputs vs inputs (power vs gas, for example for a power plant... or products vs crude for a refinery), you want to look for situations where the demand of the output disconnects from the capacity to process the input.  Ie is there a constraint where there is too much power demanded (hot weather) relative to what power plants can supply (low wind).  Is there a refinery shut down that creates a crunch on a price insensitive product.  This is a common principle across commodities.

 

Not sure if OP is even a real person at this point and this thread is starting to confuse me more since he edited his post…? If he is actually real it honestly seems like he was learning about different energy spreads and just threw as many terms as he could think of together that dealt with power/gas spreads without actually knowing what they are or what he even wanted to do.

 

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