Natural gas prices and pipeline flow, now queryable
Three gas datasets join the catalog — CAISO's daily fuel-region prices including Waha, EIA's Henry Hub spot series back to 1997, and FERC pipeline capacity and scheduled flow across 34 interstate pipelines.
Gas sets the marginal cost of power in most of the country, and until now you could ask Ask the Grid what a plant was paid but not what its fuel cost. These three datasets close that gap, and the agent can query all of them from any market — fuel cost is an input to thermal generation everywhere, not only in the market that publishes the number.
CAISO's fuel-region prices cover 201 regions from Alberta to the Permian Basin, updated every gas day back to 2015. That includes a daily price for the Waha region in West Texas — the gas point that matters most to ERCOT — alongside El Paso Permian, Opal, Malin, Kern River, Northwest Sumas, and the SoCal and PG&E citygates. CAISO posts these as a gas index plus a transport adder, so they are the delivered cost of gas to a region rather than a hub settlement price, and the catalog says so on the dataset and in every answer built from it.
Henry Hub is the national benchmark the rest of the gas market is quoted against, published by the EIA on every trading day since January 1997 — the denominator for basis, spark spreads, and implied heat rates. The pipeline postings are the physical layer underneath all of it: design, operating, available, and scheduled quantities at each metering point on 34 interstate pipelines, including deliveries tagged to power plants, so you can see the constrained segment behind a regional price rather than inferring it.
