EPA CEMS Hourly
Source URL |
|
|---|---|
Source Description |
Hourly CO2, SO2, NOx emissions and gross load |
Respondents |
Coal and high-sulfur fueled plants |
Source Format |
Comma Separated Value (.csv) |
Source Years |
1995-2020 |
Size (Download) |
8.1 GB |
PUDL Code |
|
Years Liberated |
1995-2020 |
Records Liberated |
~800 million |
Issues |
Background
As depicted by the EPA, Continuous Emissions Monitoring Systems (CEMS) are the
“total equipment necessary for the determination of a gas or particulate matter
concentration or emission rate.” They are used to determine compliance with EPA
emissions standards and are therefore associated with a given “smokestack” and are
categorized in the raw data by a corresponding unitid. Because point sources of
pollution are not alway correlated on a one-to-one basis with generation units, the
CEMS unitid serves as its own unique grouping. The EPA in collaboration with the
EIA has developed a crosswalk table
that maps the EPA’s unitid onto EIA’s boiler_id, generator_id, and
plant_id_eia. This file has been integrated into the SQL database.
The EPA Clean Air Markets Division (CAMD) has collected emissions data from CEMS units stretching back to 1995. Among the data included in CEMS are hourly SO2, CO2, NOx emission and gross load.
Who is required to install CEMS and report to EPA?
Part 75 of the Federal Code of Regulations (FRC), the backbone of the Clean Air Act Title IV and Acid Rain Program, requires coal and other solid-combusting units (see §72.2) to install and use CEMS (see §75.2, §72.6). Certain low-sulfur fueled gas and oil units (see §72.2) may seek exemption or alternative means of monitoring their emissions if desired (see §§75.23, §§75.48, §§75.66). Once CEMS are installed, Part 75 requires hourly data recording, including during startup, shutdown, and instances of malfunction as well as quarterly data reporting to the EPA. The regulation further details the protocol for missing data calculations and backup monitoring for instances of CEMS failure (see §§75,31-37).
A plain English explanation of the requirements of Part 75 is available in section 2.0 Overview of Part 75 Monitoring Requirements
What does the original data look like?
EPA CAMD publishes the CEMS data in an online data portal . The files are available in a prepackaged format, accessible via a user interface or FTP site with each downloadable zip file encompassing a year of data.
How much of the data is accessible through PUDL?
All of it!
Notable Irregularities
CEMS is by far the largest dataset in PUDL at the moment with hourly records for
thousands of plants spanning decades. Note that the ETL process can easily take all
day for the full dataset. PUDL also provides a script that converts the raw EPA CEMS
data into Apache Parquet files that can be read and queried very efficiently with
Dask. Check out the EPA CEMS example notebook
in our
pudl-examples repository
on GitHub for pointers on how to access this big dataset efficiently using dask.
PUDL 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.
Data Dictionary |
Browse Online |
|---|---|
Not Available via Datasette |
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
documentation for pudl.transform.epacems created for their respective
transform functions.
Thanks to Karl Dunkle Werner for contributing much of the EPA CEMS Hourly ETL code!