Inter-Agency Energy Data Standardization: Combining Multi-Source Data with Imperfect Information

• Activity Number: 231
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 5, 2013 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Carrie Milton*+
• Companies: Energy Information Administration

Abstract

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) uses electric power plant operations and maintenance (O&M) costs in the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS) for purposes of dispatch and retirement decisions. EIA collects power plant characteristics on the Form EIA-860. Power plant cost data are collected by two other governmental agencies: the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). This session presents the challenges that EIA faced when cross-referencing power plant characteristic data to the power plant cost data, in order to generate meaningful O&M costs for input to the NEMS model. EIA used a multi-tiered approach to matching plant-owner-level cost data to unit-level generator data. EIA's method was to (1) determine which power plants in EIA databases were represented in FERC and USDA data, (2) determine which units at the plants were represented by the cost data, and (3) apply cost data only to the generator capacity and generation that respondents owned. In the absence of common identifiers, EIA relied on clues in the cost data to determine which plants and associated units matched the EIA data.