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Huffing and puffing at the Fed appears to have had some impact:

Median one- and three-year-ahead inflation expectations both declined sharply in July, from 6.8 percent and 3.6 percent in June to 6.2 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively. Both decreases were broad-based across income groups, but largest among respondents with annual household incomes under $50,000 and respondents with no more than a high school education. Median five-year ahead inflation expectations, which have been elicited in the monthly SCE core survey on an ad-hoc basis since the beginning of this year, also declined to 2.3 percent from 2.8 percent in June. Expectations about year-ahead price increases for gas and food fell sharply. Home price growth expectations and year-ahead spending growth expectations continued to pull back from recent series highs. Households’ income growth expectations improved.

Assiduous Readers may remember my fascination with pumped storage – a piece of the energy storage puzzle that must be installed before green energy becomes more than a political slogan. A new plant has commenced operation in Switzerland:

Fourteen years after the start of construction work, the Nant de Drance pumped storage power plant will be put into operation on 1 July 2022. Federal Councillor Simonetta Sommaruga and the President of the Cantonal Council of the Valais, Roberto Schmidt, today took the opportunity to visit the power plant and get a first-hand impression. Located 600 m below ground in a cavern between the Emosson and Vieux Emosson reservoirs in the Finhaut municipality of Valais, the Nant de Drance power plant will feature six pump turbines with a capacity of 150 MW each. The highly flexible machines make it possible to switch from pumping at full power to turbining at full power in less than five minutes, i.e. from -900 MW to +900 MW. The volume of water passing through the Nant de Drance turbines, 360 m3 a second, corresponds to the flow of the Rhône at Geneva in summer. The upper reservoir of Vieux Emosson holds 25 million m3 of water, which represents a storage capacity of 20 million kWh. These characteristics allow Nant de Drance to play a crucial role in stabilising the electric grid. In face of the growth of new renewable energies such as wind and photovoltaic whose production is intermittent, this flexibility is required to compensate for the fluctuations on the electric grid and maintain continual equilibrium between production and electricity consumption. Nant de Drance works like a gigantic battery which allows excess electricity to be stored in a short term or to produce the necessary energy when demand exceeds production.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2022 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.