The United States government coordinates the collection of hourly electricity demand data from regional entities for use in planning and decision making processes. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) provides easily accessible data records spanning 2006-2018 for a mix of Balancing Authorities (BAs) and Planning Areas with Form 714.
While the Energy Information Administration (EIA) began their collection of hourly electricity demand data in July of 2015 for all BAs with Form 930. The EIA data are updated in near real-time and bring other benefits such as including hourly generation by resource type: coal, hydropower, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar, petroleum, and other.
An interesting question for the energy modeling community is, does the 2017 data gathered by FERC align with the 2017 data gathered by EIA? Can these records be used almost interchangeably? Additionally, benefits will be realized by stitching together the longer historical FERC data records with the EIA records that contain more details of the current system.
One of our collaborators, Zane Selvans (@ZaneSelvans) of the Catalyst Cooperative (@CatalystCoop), mapped the ~200 FERC respondents to the ~70 EIA BAs and arranged the FERC data into a more usable format. With this, we compared the hourly demand values for the successfully mapped BAs for 2017. Details of the comparison methods are at the end of this post.
Results
We compare the ratio of FERC hourly values to EIA hourly values and calculate the ratio of mean, minimum, and maximum values for each region.
California Independent System Operator (CISO)
Midwest Independent System Operator
(MISO)
The two examples here show hourly comparisons for CISO, with most values nearly identical and nearly all within 10%, and MISO, with most values agreeing within 10% and overall agreement based on the ratio of mean values of 1.01.
ISO New England (ISNE)
PJM Interconnection (PJM)
Some regions show a mean value close to 1 yet have non-uniform features in their distributions, such as ISNE (ratio of mean values = 0.99) and PJM (ratio of mean values = 0.98).
Furthermore, other regions have substantial discrepancies in the ratio of their mean values. A histogram of the ratios of the mean values for each compared BA shows agreement within a few percent for over 30 BAs (a csv file is attached at the bottom showing the ratio of their mean, minimum, and maximum values). Additionally, we compare the minimum and maximum values and see a distribution similar to the mean value comparison.
Ratio of the mean of demand values for each mapped BA (FERC mean value/EIA mean value)
Ratio of the minimum and maximum demand values for each mapped BA
Conclusion
There are a considerable number of Balancing Authorities that have reasonably similar FERC and EIA hourly demand records based on agreement within a few percent of the ratios of mean, minimum, and maximum values. This indicates that the FERC and EIA records may be approximately interchangeable for these BAs if the exact hourly profile is not a concern (see excel file for list). The fact that many histograms contain a spread about 1.0 is worth exploring for anyone considering using these profiles as replacements for each other while modeling. Are there biases in which hours are misaligned?
In the future, this could also allow analysts to stitch together the longer FERC records with the more current and detailed EIA records. The Catalyst Cooperative and Zane are pursuing work along these lines. We wish them the best of luck!
Details
The FERC data contains records from both Balancing Authorities and Planning Areas, while the EIA records are only for Balancing Authorities. Therefore, many of the FERC records do not have EIA equivalents. We only compare records that we think should align.
Both the FERC and EIA data records are imperfect, containing zero values, missing values, and the occasional outlier value. For the EIA data, we use the EIA records after removing outlier values based on the details in this paper. For the FERC data, we use the FERC records arranged by Zane with all zero values removed. Hours are only included in the comparison if the corresponding hourly value in each record was present and was not removed by these two cleaning methods.
- Summary csv file: comparing the mean, minimum, and maximum values in the FERC 714 and EIA 930 hourly demand data for year 2017 for the matched BAs.
- FERC to EIA mapping: the mapping of FERC respondents to their EIA codes and acronyms provided by Zane.