FERC Form 714 – Annual Electric Balancing Authority Area and Planning Area Report

Source URL

https://www.ferc.gov/industries-data/electric/general-information/electric-industry-forms/form-no-714-annual-electric

Source Description

Electric transmitting utilities operating balancing authority areas and planning areas with annual peak demand over 200MW are required to file Form 714 with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), reporting balancing authority area generation, actual and scheduled inter-balancing authority area power transfers, and net energy for load, summer-winter generation peaks and system lambda.

Download Size

174 MB

Temporal Coverage

2006-2023

PUDL Code

ferc714

Issues

Open FERC Form 714 – Annual Electric Balancing Authority Area and Planning Area Report issues

PUDL Database Tables

We’ve segmented the processed data into the following normalized data tables. Clicking on the links will show you a description of the table as well as the names and descriptions of each of its fields.

Background

FERC Form 714, otherwise known as the Annual Electric Balancing Authority Area and Planning Area Report, collects data and provides insights about balancing authority area and planning area operations.

Download additional documentation

Data available through PUDL

The data we’ve integrated from FERC Form 714 includes:

With the EIA IDs we can link the hourly electricity demand to a particular geographic region at the county level because utilities and balancing authorities report their service territories in core_eia861__yearly_service_territory. From that information we estimate historical hourly electricity demand by state.

Plant operators reported in core_eia860__scd_plants and generator ownership information reported in core_eia860__scd_ownership are linked to core_eia860__scd_utilities and core_eia861__yearly_balancing_authority and can therefore be linked to the core_ferc714__respondent_id table.

Who submits this data?

Electric utilities operating balancing authority areas and planning areas with annual peak demand over 200MW are required to file FERC Form 714.

What does the original data look like?

There are several epochs of FERC-714 and its predecessor data, published in various formats:

  • 1993-1999: Data collected by NERC regions without standardized electronic filing.

  • 1999-2004: Data collected by FERC without standardized electronic filing.

  • 2005: Data collected by FERC without standardized electronic filing but not posted on their website and only available through the regulatory filing eLibrary.

  • 2006-2020: Standardized electronic filing. ASCII encoded CSV files exported from a VisualFoxPro database.

  • 2021-present: Standardized electronic filing using the XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) dialect of XML.

We only plan to integrate the data from the standardized electronic reporting era (2006+) since the format of the earlier data varies for each reporting balancing authority and utility, and would be very labor intensive to parse and reconcile.

Notable Irregularities

Timezone errors

The original hourly electricity demand time series is plagued with timezone and daylight savings vs. standard time irregularities, which we have done our best to clean up. The timestamps in the clean data are all in UTC, with a timezone code stored in a separate column, so that the times can be easily localized or converted. It’s certainly not perfect, but its much better than the original data and it’s easy to work with!

Sign errors

Not all respondents use the same sign convention for reporting “demand.” The vast majority consider demand / load that they serve to be a positive number, and so we’ve standardized the data to use that convention.

Reporting gaps

There are a lot of reporting gaps, especially for smaller respondents. Sometimes these are brief, and sometimes they are entire years. There are also a number of outliers and suspicious values (e.g. a long series of identical consecutive values). We have some tools that we’ve built to clean up these outliers in pudl.analysis.timeseries_cleaning.

Respondent-to-balancing-authority inconsistencies

Because utilities and balancing authorities occasionally change their service territories or merge, the demand reported by any individual “respondent” may correspond to wildly different consumers in different years. To make it at least somewhat possible to compare the reported data across time, we’ve also compiled historical service territory maps for the respondents based on data reported in EIA Form 861 – Annual Electric Power Industry Report. However, it’s not always easy to identify which EIA utility or balancing authority corresponds to a FERC-714 respondent. See the pudl.output.ferc714.Respondent class for some tooling that we’ve built to address this issue. Other code that underlies this work can be found in pudl.analysis.service_territory and pudl.analysis.spatial.

The pudl.analysis.state_demand script brings together all of the above to estimate historical hourly electricity demand by state for 2006-2020.

Combining XBRL and CSV data

The format of the company identifiers (CIDs) used in the CSV data (2006-2020) and the XBRL data (2021+) differs. To link respondents between both data formats, we manually map the IDs from both datasets and create a respondent_id_ferc714 in pudl.package_data.glue.respondent_id_ferc714.csv.

This CSV builds on the migrated data provided by FERC during the transition from CSV to XBRL data, which notes that:

Companies that did not have a CID prior to the migration have been assigned a CID that begins with R, i.e., a temporary RID. These RIDs will be replaced in future with the accurate CIDs and new datasets will be published.

The file names of the migrated data (which correspond to CSV IDs) and the respondent CIDs in the migrated files provide the basis for ID mapping. Though CIDs are intended to be static, some of the CIDs in the migrated data weren’t found in the actual XBRL data, and the same respondents were reporting data using different CIDs. To ensure accurate record matching, we manually reviewed the CIDs for each respondent, matching based on name and location. Some quirks to note:

  • All respondents are matched 1:1 from CSV to XBRL data. Unmatched respondents mostly occur due to mergers, splits, acquisitions, and companies that no longer exist.

  • Some CIDs assigned during the migration process do not appear in the data. Given the intention by FERC to make these CIDs permanent, they are still included in the mapping CSV in case these respondents re-appear. All temporary IDs (beginning with R) were removed.

PUDL Data Transformations

To see the transformations applied to the data in each table, you can read the docstrings for pudl.transform.ferc714 created for each table’s respective transform function.