Energy Traders Watch the Polar Vortex and La Nina as Winter Nears
Nobody controls the weather, and yet temperatures this winter will ripple through every conceivable market, from fuel to food, with a particularly frigid outcome threatening to turn a worldwide energy crunch into a full-blown crisis.
The stakes have never been higher. If the weather’s bad, households and businesses around the world, already facing the heftiest energy costs in years, could face crippling heating bills. Governments struggling to ease fears of inflation could lose popular support. And the clean energy transition, already under fire after low wind generation helped contribute to Europe’s power shortage, could be thrown even further into question.
Every meteorologist’s long-term forecast is frustratingly different, given how hard it is to accurately predict the winter’s bite when summer just ended. But projections share some features: The emergence of a La Nina could bring colder weather to the northern U.S. and milder climates in the south while drying out other parts of the world. At the same time, the polar vortex that contains icy air above the North Pole appears weaker than last year. That means there’s a greater chance that frigid cold will occasionally spill out of the Arctic into the temperate zones of Asia, North America and Europe, bringing intermittent chilling effects throughout the season.
“We expect a ‘warm sandwich’ this heating season with a potentially very cold center,” said Todd Crawford, director of meteorology at commercial-forecaster Atmospheric G2. That could mean an unusually warm start to the season, then a cold period into January, followed by a mild end of winter and an early spring. “These expectations are broadly appropriate for all major energy-demand centers in eastern U.S., western Europe and northeast Asia.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-01/how-cold-will-winter-2021-2022-get-la-nina-polar-vortex-are-signs-to-watch
