EIA has updated its Southern California Daily Energy Report to provide a "winter" edition of market information (the original "summer" edition also remains available from a pull-down menu bar at the top of the main dashboard). The dashboard includes important information that EIA regularly collects about energy operations and the management of electricity and natural gas systems in Southern California in the aftermath of a leak at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility in October 2015. The leak has since been plugged but has resulted in continuing limitations on the use of that facility. The winter edition provides more details on natural gas activity than the summer edition, which focuses primarily on electricity markets that are the main source of summer demand for natural gas in the region. EIA updates the dashboard at about 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time every morning. Key elements in the winter dashboard include:

Interstate natural gas pipelines and the Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) system deliver natural gas into the SoCalGas system. With less natural gas available from storage, deliveries to SoCalGas are likely to be more important this winter than in the past. This new chart shows daily deliveries of natural gas to each of SoCalGas' major receipt zones: Southern, Northern, and the Wheeler Ridge area. SoCalGas has firm access rights up to a total of 3.565 Bcf/d of natural gas from these three zones. However, this level would not be enough to meet demand on a peak winter day, so SoCalGas supplements these supplies with withdrawals from its four underground natural gas storage fields and modest amounts of natural gas produced in Southern California in its Coastal Zone and Line 85 Zone.

Recent daily natural gas receipts and demand (sendout) help determine if daily non-storage sources of natural gas are sufficient to meet demand. Net daily changes in SoCalGas storage inventories show how storage injections and withdrawals balance demand for natural gas with available supplies.

The annual trend in natural gas storage inventories in Southern California is compared with last year's inventory level at this time and with the previous five-year range. Lower storage levels relative to prior winters indicate how much less in-region stored natural gas is available to meet natural gas demand this winter. Although current restrictions do not allow natural gas injections into Aliso Canyon, on November 1, 2016, SoCalGas requested authorization from the California Public Utility Commission and the State Oil and Gas Supervisor (Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources) to reinject natural gas at Aliso Canyon in some of the wells.

Changes in spot natural gas prices can indicate constraints or disruptions in the natural gas system. Much higher-than-normal price differences between downstream (demand) market points, like the PG&E Citygate or the SoCal Citygate, and upstream (supply) market points, like in Western Wyoming, the San Juan Basin, or West Texas and Southern California border, can indicate conditions including wellhead freeze-offs, high market demand, cold weather in the Southwest, high use of pipeline networks, or unplanned outages on pipelines. This new daily chart shows how winter market fundamentals (supply, demand, and storage) can lead to price differences between the Southern California border and market and supply trading points relevant to Southern California.

The "market" columns show how much higher the spot price of natural is at the SoCal Citygate or the PG&E Citygate compared with the SoCal Border. Conversely, the "supply" columns show how much higher the spot price of natural gas is at the SoCal Border compared with the supply areas of Western Wyoming, the San Juan Basin, and West Texas. California Citygate natural gas prices are usually higher than the natural gas price at the Southern California border because of the additional costs to transport natural gas from the border to the Citygate. The spot price of natural gas at the SoCal Border is usually higher than the spot price of natural gas at the upstream trading points to cover those transportation costs. However, these differences can be negative when other destination markets provide more value than the Citigates or Border. In those cases, the smaller-than-normal or negative difference signals that little gas is likely to be moving from the higher-priced source areas to the lower-priced California market.

The previous 365-day and 30-day ranges only account for trade days within those ranges. As of now, data are not included in the EIA database.

Southern California daily natural gas prices for 2015 and 2016 show the Southern California Border price. Higher prices at the SoCal Border can reflect periods of stress on the energy delivery systems. So far in 2016, prices have reflected mixed levels of stress. During the spring and early summer, natural gas prices were generally low. Nationally, the 2015–16 winter that was warmer than normal reduced the need to withdraw natural gas from underground storage facilities to operate natural gas-fired furnaces. This, in turn, lowered the need to buy natural gas in the spot market in early spring to backfill for depleted inventories. Relatively plentiful hydroelectricity, increased electricity imports, and more generation from solar and wind resources also eased demand for natural gas for electricity generation. There were several episodes of natural gas price volatility during summer 2016 when the local price of natural gas at the SoCal Border and the SoCal Citygate spiked temporarily. These price increases mostly resulted from warmer-than-normal temperatures coupled with pipeline constraints and reduced regional storage deliverability.

Past actual temperatures and near-future forecasts of daily low and high temperatures are provided for Los Angeles. For the winter, temperatures are a good measure of likely furnace load for space heating needs, and Los Angeles is the center of the metropolitan area. These daily ranges are compared with normal ranges and with record ranges.

Hourly electric load is summed across Southern California, including load by these utilities: Southern California Edison, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, San Diego Gas and Electric Company, and the Imperial Irrigation District in the winter report. Historically, Aliso Canyon provided natural gas supply flexibility to manage variability in daily and hourly electricity demand. These levels are compared with historical ranges to show if the current load is high or low. The black line is the coincident peak load record.

To have natural gas available to meet residential and commercial customer needs on the coldest days, electric utilities and grid managers may rely on electricity imports to a greater extent than when Aliso Canyon was fully operational and when SoCalGas had much higher levels of stored gas available. This new chart illustrates the role that electricity imports from the Pacific Northwest into California play in meeting Southern California's seasonal loads. The chart shows hourly electricity flows transmitted by the Bonneville Power Administration to CAISO along the Pacific DC Intertie. For yesterday, the chart shows the following information for the Pacific DC Intertie to CAISO path: total transfer capability, day-ahead flows, and actual flows for delivery to CAISO. For today, the chart shows the day-ahead flows from the Pacific DC Intertie to CAISO.

Spot electricity prices at the SP15 trading point — the main zone for trading electricity in Southern California — are reported by hour. EIA uses CAISO's 15-minute data for SP15 across each of the four intervals per hour to derive average hourly prices for yesterday's day-ahead market and real-time market. This calculation also provides a schedule of the locational marginal prices (LMPs) for today's day-ahead by hour. Using hourly LMPs instead of daily, on-peak, average LMPs makes it easier to assess how changes in hourly loads and key hourly electricity imports align with changes in hourly prices. The chart lines do not show prices that exceed $100 per megawatthour, but users can see these prices by directing their keyboard pointer or mouse to the location on the chart where the prices exceeds the $100/MWh range.

This updated regional map shows the key natural gas pipeline and storage infrastructure in Southern California. The map now includes a daily total of natural gas receipts from interstate and intrastate natural gas pipelines by major zones in the SoCalGas system. The map does not show the relatively modest amount of Southern California natural gas production flowing into the SoCalGas system, but these supplies are part of the overall natural gas receipts already reported in the dashboard's Natural Gas Receipts and Sendout chart.