Posted: February 20, 2026, 2:07 pm

MISO & Fern

This week MISO did a post mortem on Winter Storm Fern in their Reliability Subcommittee meeting with stakeholder presentation. The report centered around January 24 when they issued two Max Generation Events- Step 2c meaning they were one step from load shed.

While January 24th wasn’t the largest load day of the recent cold snap, it was the largest unplanned outage day in MISO during the storm. MISO did provide some information on where the outages came from, but as we can see below, a lot of it is labeled behind the meter or import which isn’t broken into fuel type. According to the report, there were some natural gas unit issues with generation not keeping up with scheduled commitments. Pulling a gas production chart from our friends at Pinebrook from a few weeks ago, it makes sense some gas plants had issues.

As we mentioned above, imports or “not in the MISO footprint” outages were part of the outage issue. Interestingly enough, MISO’s very own mechanism for incentivizing those very imports was down when needed most as described in the slide below. Looking at the map below, it appears roughly 5 GW of imports were scheduled. Typically, a real time LMP mechanism would draw more imports as needed through higher prices. As stated, since no prices were being published, there was no incentive to send electricity to MISO.

Finally, MISO laid out some “lessons learned”. The two that stood out to us are the stranded capacity in the sound and the peak hour planning. What we find interesting is these have come up more than once over the years. The bottleneck has been well document and we are very interested in the “enhancement will be delivered this year”. Also, considering a big issue with natural gas was lead times, it seems a bigger picture than peak hour would be warranted.

Natural Gas Market Commentary

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All remains quiet in the natural gas market as winter weather continues to fade and spring sits on the horizon. Futures pricing traded in a very tight, sideways range this week, leaving the forward curve little changed from last Friday. Technical support looks stout at the $3.00-per-MMBtu level for the prompt-month contract. That benchmark was breached briefly several times this week, but so far there has been no indication of a meaningful breakdown.

With momentum shifting from bearish to neutral, all eyes will be on temperature forecasts for the upcoming shoulder season. Any signal of lingering cold deep into March – even if relatively minor – could be enough to keep the market propped up, while an early start to spring has the potential to usher in further downside. Overall, with inventories on track to finish near or above five-year average levels and production still churning at record levels, it is hard to get too bullish about natural gas in the near term.

One supportive factor comes from the LNG export space. Golden Pass LNG is next in line and began taking in more meaningful feed gas this week. While full capacity of 2.4 Bcf per day is unlikely to be reached until 2027, this week’s activity suggests commercial operation of Train 1 (0.8 Bcf per day) is moving closer to fruition. This alone is unlikely to significantly alter the 2026 fundamental balance, but if conditions tighten elsewhere, new baseload LNG export capacity could amplify the impact.