FERC Form 714 – Annual Electric Balancing Authority Area and Planning Area Report¶
Source URL |
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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 |
148 MB |
Temporal Coverage |
2006-2020 |
PUDL Code |
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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¶
Download the following files for further context:
How much of the data is accessible through PUDL?¶
The data we’ve integrated from FERC Form 714 includes:
hourly electricity demand by utility or balancing authority from 2006-2020
a table identifying the form respondents including their EIA utility or balancing authority ID, which allows us to link the FERC-714 data to other information reported in EIA Form 860 – Annual Electric Generator Report and EIA Form 861 – Annual Electric Power Industry Report.
The hourly demand data for 2006-2020 is about 15 million records. There are about 200 respondents that show up in the respondents table.
WIth the EIA IDs, we link the hourly electricity demand to a particular georgraphic region at the county level, because utilities and balancing authorities report their service territories in core_eia861__yearly_service_territory, and from that information we can 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 so can also be linked to the core_ferc714__respondent_id table, as well as the core_epacems__hourly_emissions unit-level emissions and generation data reported in EPA Hourly Continuous Emission Monitoring System (CEMS).
Who is required to fill out the form?¶
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 have plans to integrate the data from the standardized electronic reporting era 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¶
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!
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.
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.
Because utilities and balancing authorities occasionally change their service
territories or merge, the demand reproted 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.
PUDL Data Transformations¶
The PUDL transformation process cleans the input data so that it is adjusted for uniformity, corrected for errors, and ready for bulk programmatic use.
To see the transformations applied to the data in each table, you can read the
doc-strings for pudl.transform.ferc714 created for each tables’ respective
transform function.