How to map balancing authorities within EIA and FERC regions?

[dt-woods]

How to map balancing authorities within EIA and FERC regions?

[m-jamieson]

Well this seems problematic. Based on this FERC webpage, it seems like FERC has largely given up on trying to track this data themselves.

Regarding your questions:

1. I'm sure all we needed was the now dead link.
2. The various FERC regions comprise the balancing authority areas. The one reason we had FERC region as a level of aggregation was because it was a clear mapping of BAAs to FERC regions. NERC regions are different and don't cleanly align in all cases.
3. Great question. Will need to see if we can hunt down something.
4. See question 3. TBD at this point with the one missing link.

[dt-woods]

Does the electricity baseline need to support mapping to FERC/NERC regions or are EIA regions and their balancing authorities good enough?

[m-jamieson]

I don't have an immediate negative reaction to using the EIA regions (Southeast, Midwest, Northwest, Southwest, California, Carolinas, Texas, Florida, New England, New York, Mid-Atlantic, Central, Tennessee). I might need to check in with Greg Cooney to see if there was a real strong desire for getting FERC specifically or if the desire was more around having some sort of level of aggregation between BAA and US.

After looking all this over, the mapping of EIA region to FERC region might have just been a visual assessment rather than an explicit crosswalk. To that end, it might be reasonable to keep using the existing EIA region to FERC region mapping that exists in that file and simply using the new version of EIA930.

I would prefer to maintain the ability to do FERC rather than having to go in an make changes to all instances of FERC to EIA or something.

[dt-woods]

Can do. Thanks, Matt.

[dt-woods]

BTW, from a cursory look at EIA 930, there may be some-to-a-few more BAs added the mix since 2016. Shall we employ the same "based on visual inspection" mapping and just update the existing workbook?

[m-jamieson]

Well the mapping I believe is from EIA region to FERC region, so we shouldn't need to evaluate each BAA. The BAAs are already mapped to EIA regions in the 930 data. Just need to reuse the lookup table I think.

[dt-woods]

Good point! (until they introduce new regions)

[dt-woods]

To replace 'BA_Codes_930.xlsx' (reference by read_ba_codes in utils.py) and its supplement 'BA code match.csv' (used in utils.py and eia860_facilities.py):

See Microsoft Excel workbook:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/930-content/EIA930_Reference_Tables.xlsx

Columns from the 'BAs' worksheet include:

• 'BA Code'
• 'BA Name'
• 'Region/Country Name' (i.e., EIA Region)
• 'Region/Country Code' (i.e., EIA Code)

Apply the following EIA region to FERC region mapping:

EIA Region	FERC Region
California	CAISO
Carolinas	Southeast (SE)
Central	SPP
Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Inc.	ERCOT
Florida	Southeast (SE)
Mid-Atlantic	PJM
Midwest	MISO
New England ISO	ISO-NE
New York Independent System Operator	NYISO
Northwest	Northwest (NW)
Southeast	Southeast (SE)
Southwest	Southwest (SW)
Tennessee Valley Authority	Southeast (SE)

This mapping is based on the now defunct 'Electric Power Markets' map provided by www.ferc.gov (displayed below for posterity):

Note that additional information is also available, including active status (Yes/No), activation/retirement date. For mapping purposes, all BAs (active and inactive) should probably be included.