hi lee. forgive my all lower case...broke a bone in my right hand playing road hockey and its in a cast til mid august.
what i am actually looking at is not forecasts of temperature, but of temperature anomalies. sure its hot thru labor day but the question is will it be hotter than normal. its the magnitude and geographical range of the anomally that determines the marginal shifts in electricity generation. humidity and overnight minimum temps play a big role. also, the effects are not linear and have to do with the exponential increase in power required to maintain a specific indoor temperature as outdoor temps and humidity increase, and the psychological perception by individuals to heat. these are the elements but i sure haven't worked out the formula. long story short to say that all the reliable probabalistic and statistical models point to above average temperature summer for the states east of the rockies except for new england (where the forecast is for close to normal conditions), and so ng demand will remain high all summer. storage is unlikely to recover further beyond this point, so we will go into fall with a relative deficit in storage compared to the last couple of years.
As usual, the short term fly in the ointment is a gomex tropical storm and despite the thunderstorms in the northeast gulf coast expected for the next week there aren't yet any signs of storm development either in the gomex or carribean during the week to come. Cheers, cj