Rapids Ahead: Navigating Market & Climate Change to Manage Risk in the West

The convergence of hydrology and climate shifts, along with CAISO's Energy Imbalance Market (EIM) and Extended Day-Ahead Market (EDAM) initiatives, are propagating volatility, basis, congestion, and transactability risk throughout the Western grid, fundamentally altering planning, trading, and investment decisions.  

In this webinar, Dr. Gary Dorris, CEO at Ascend Analytics, Carley Dolch, Managing Director of Energy Risk Solutions, Dr. Dominique Bain, Senior Analyst, Dr. Carlos Blanco, Managing Director of Risk Management and ESG, and Scott Nicholson, Manager of Resource Planning and Valuation, discuss market participation, BESS storage deployment, and optimally structuring hedges. The webinar provides insights and strategies that allow utilities, asset owners, and counterparties to navigate and mitigate risk under these new conditions.

In this webinar, participants will learn:

• Why hydropower must be treated as conditionally available and risk-weighted rather than a firm planning resource.

• How EIM and EDAM connect markets while simultaneously amplifying exposure to diverging regional hydrologic regimes.

• How energy trading strategies, PPA structures, financial instruments, and spot market participation are adapting to changing transactability constraints and volatility.

• How the role of utility-scale BESS storage is evolving from energy arbitrage toward system-level shock absorption, congestion management, and interface risk mitigation.

Access this webinar now, or read more about how Ascend can help asset owners develop financial and physical hedge strategies to mitigate hydro resource risks in western US energy markets.