Just three weeks ago we warned of "all kinds of mayhem" [5]about to be let loose as scientists feared this year's El Nino may be among the biggest ever, and as Bloomberg reports [6], the impact is already being felt in California... but not in much needed rain or snow. California has yet to see the full force of El Nino, and it’s already tripping up the state’s power-demand forecasters. The state saw "significant" electricity price spikes in the third quarter as El Nino made it difficult to predict how much power would be needed with a "relatively high percentage of intervals" when prices spiked above $1,000 a megawatt-hour in the 5-minute market... 25 times normal costs!
As we detailed previously, in the simplest terms, an El Nino pattern is a warming of the equatorial Pacific caused by a weakening of the trade winds that normally push sun-warmed waters to the west. This triggers a reaction from the atmosphere above.
Its name traces back hundreds of years to the coast of Peru, where fishermen noticed the Pacific Ocean sometimes warmed in late December, around Christmas, and coincided with changes in fish populations. They named it El Nino after the infant Jesus Christ. Today meteorologists call it the El Nino Southern Oscillation.
The last time there was an El Nino of similar magnitude to the current one, the record-setting event of 1997-1998, floods, fires, droughts and other calamities killed at least 30,000 people and caused $100 billion in damage, Trenberth estimates. Another powerful El Nino, in 1918-19, sank India into a brutal drought and probably contributed to the global flu pandemic, according to a study by the Climate Program Office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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While the effect on the U.S. may not reach a crescendo until February, much of the rest of the world is already feeling the impact, Trenberth said.
“It probably sits at No. 2 in terms of how strong this event is, but we won’t be able to rank it until it peaks out and ends,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.
Its effects are just beginning in much of the world -- for the most part, it hasn’t really reached North America -- and yet it’s already shaping up potentially as one of the three strongest El Nino patterns since record-keeping began in 1950. It will dominate weather’s many twists and turns through the end of this year and well into next. And it’s causing gyrations in everything from the price of Colombian coffee to the fate of cold-water fish.
Expect “major disruptions, widespread droughts and floods,” Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. In principle, with advance warning, El Nino can be managed and prepared for, “but without that knowledge, all kinds of mayhem will let loose.
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"California load models have not experienced weather patterns like we have seen this past year, especially the high temperatures of October," Steven Greenlee, a spokesman for the California ISO, said in an e-mail statement. The grid operator is "retraining" its forecasting models, Greenlee said.
The Northern California hub, which includes San Francisco, continued to see brief price surges in October and November, grid data show.
The good news...
On average, power prices slumped in the third quarter from a year earlier due in large part to cheaper natural gas, the report showed. Spot on-peak power at the Northern California hub averaged $38.15 a megawatt-hour from July through September, down 23 percent from the same period last year and the lowest average for the quarter since 2012.
But...
The state saw “significant” electricity price spikes in the third quarter as El Nino made it difficult to predict how much power would be needed on hot summer and fall days, the California Independent System Operator Corp. said Monday in a report.
Record rainfall and regional cloud cover in Southern California also perplexed forecasters, the grid operator said.
"With El Nino, California and the Southwest tends to get more storminess and that is inherently more challenging to forecast," Matt Rogers, president of Commodity Weather Group LLC, said in an e-mail Tuesday. "The extra cloudiness and sporadic storminess this autumn as well as some heat spikes early in the third quarter can be attributed to El Nino influences."
In California power markets, the odd weather led to "load forecast errors on several days with particularly high loads," according to the report. In September, there was a “relatively high percentage of intervals” when prices spiked above $1,000 a megawatt-hour in the 5-minute market.
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So already electrcity prices are spiking 25x normal... and the biggest effects of El-Nino are yet to hit...


