Natural reservoirs: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
These stores cost nothing, but their value depends on weather and climate: snowpack and rainfall set how much water and hydropower are available, and ground or water temperatures set how well heat pumps work. Scarcity shows up in other prices.
No public price Natural reservoirs has no public monthly price series: A natural resource, not traded; its value shows up elsewhere.What its price moves with
Snowpack and reservoirs are the main store of water in places like California, so a poor snow year raises water prices directly. The water price series is shown, but natural stores themselves have no price, so no statistics appear.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Dams turn stored lakes and snowmelt into electricity. A wet year fills reservoirs and cheapens power, while droughts cut output and raise prices. The dam series is a construction-cost proxy, so it reflects building costs rather than how full reservoirs are.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Run-of-river plants have little storage of their own, so they depend even more on natural flows from snowmelt and rain. Their output rises and falls with the seasons, making them a direct way to tap these natural stores.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.When rivers and reservoirs run low, grids burn more gas to fill the gap, so dry years raise gas demand and power prices. This makes gas markets in hydro-heavy regions sensitive to snow and rainfall.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Ground and water-source heat pumps draw on the steady temperature of soil, lakes and the sea. A warmer source means less electricity per unit of heat, so these natural stores lower running costs, but they carry no price of their own.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Pumped hydro copies what lakes do naturally, pumping water uphill when power is cheap and releasing it when dear. Sites often build on existing natural reservoirs, which keeps costs down where geography allows.
No public price for pumped hydro storage, so the link is explained in words only.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.