EIA Form 714 Database
EIA Form 714 Annual Electric Balancing Authority Area and Planning Area Report Dataset
32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
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Results for “Balancing authority areas”
Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
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The value of improved wind power forecasting: Grid flexibility quantification, ramp capability analysis, and impacts of electricity market operation timescales
The value of improving wind power forecasting accuracy at different electricity market operation timescales was analyzed by simulating the IEEE 118-bus test system as modified to emulate the generation mixes of the Midcontinent, California, and New England independent system operator balancing authority areas. The wind power forecasting improvement methodology and error analysis for the data set were elaborated. Production cost simulation was conducted on the three emulated systems with a total of 480 scenarios, considering the impacts of different generation technologies, wind penetration levels, and wind power forecasting improvement timescales. The static operational flexibility of the three systems was compared through the diversity of generation mix, the percentage of must-run baseload generators, as well as the available ramp rate and the minimum generation levels. The dynamic operational flexibility was evaluated by the real-time upward and downward ramp capacity. Simulation results show that the generation resource mix plays a crucial role in evaluating the value of improved wind power forecasting at different timescales. In addition, the changes in annual operational electricity generation costs were mostly influenced by the dominant resource in the system. Lastly, the impacts of pumped-storage resources, generation ramp rates, and system minimum generation level requirements on the value of improved wind power forecasting were also analyzed.
17 WIND ENERGY↗
Quantifying the Economic and Grid Reliability Impacts of Improved Wind Power Forecasting
Wind power forecasting is an important tool in power system operations to address variability and uncertainty. Accurately doing so is important to reducing the occurrence and length of curtailment, enhancing market efficiency, and improving the operational reliability of the bulk power system. This research quantifies the value of wind power forecasting improvements in the IEEE 118-bus test system as modified to emulate the generation mixes of Midcontinent, California, and New England independent system operator balancing authority areas. To measure the economic value, a commercially available production cost modeling tool was used to simulate the multi-timescale unit commitment (UC) and economic dispatch process for calculating the cost savings and curtailment reductions. To measure the reliability improvements, an in-house tool, FESTIV, was used to calculate the system's area control error and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation Control Performance Standard 2. The approach allowed scientific reproducibility of results and cross-validation of the tools. A total of 270 scenarios were evaluated to accommodate the variation of three factors: generation mix, wind penetration level, and wind fore-casting improvements. The modified IEEE 118-bus systems utilized 1 year of data at multiple timescales, including the day-ahead UC, 4-hour-ahead UC, and 5-min real-time dispatch. The value of improved wind power forecasting was found to be strongly tied to the conventional generation mix, existence of energy storage devices, and the penetration level of wind energy. The simulation results demonstrate that wind power forecasting brings clear benefits to power system operations.
17 WIND ENERGY↗
Operational Energy Life Cycle Data Development for the National Institute of Standards And Technology (NIST) Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) Neutral Environmental Software Tool (NEST)
For this analysis, regionalized life cycle assessment (LCA) results for environmental impacts (using the Tool for Reduction and Assessment of Chemicals and Other Environmental Impacts [TRACI] 2.1) and cumulative energy demand (using the Federal Life Cycle Analysis Commons Elementary Flow List [FEDEFL] Inventory Methods v1.0.0) were evaluated for the production and utilization of electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, and propane as commodities within residential and commercial buildings. These results can used as a framework for future research into net zero, high-performance buildings, such as done here for the Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) database by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Engineering Laboratory. The geographical results were assigned to each United States (U.S.) Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) code based on the ZIP code location and corresponding Balancing Authority Area, natural gas basin, and Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts (PADDs). Additionally, previously developed models were utilized to develop future life cycle profiles. Projections were based on data available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration Annual Energy Outlook 2022 through 2050 (AEO 2022). Electricity LCA models were updated based on AEO 2022 projected annual generation mixes, while the natural gas baseline model was updated based on projected shares of natural gas types (conventional, shale, tight, and coalbed methane). Projections of crude oil production rates and export rates were applied to the petroleum baseline model in five-year increments to investigate their effects on the life cycle profile of fuel oil and propane. While only 100-year Global Warming Potential (GWP-100) with climate carbon feedback (CC-FB) and Cumulative Energy Demand are shown in Section 4: Results, the complete results, including Acidification Potential, Eutrophication Potential, Freshwater Ecotoxicity Potential, GWP-100 without inclusion of CC-FB, Human Health Impacts Potentials (Cancer, Non-Cancer), Ozone Depletion Potential, Particulate Matter Formation Potential, and Photochemical Smog Formation Potential, are tabulated for each ZIP code in the Excel worksheets that accompany this analysis. For the Excel spreadsheet tools associated with this report, please go to https://www.netl.doe.gov/energy-analysis/details?id=f8890fac-be55-44ac-aaa9-e2888bfabe93
32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
Demand Response Across the Continental US for 2006
This project estimates hourly demand response availability across the continental U.S. for the year 2006. The resulting data set is disaggregated by balancing authority area, end use, and grid application. End uses include 14 categories across residential, commercial, industrial and municipal sectors. Grid applications include the 5 bulk power system services of regulation reserve, flexibility (or ramping) reserve, contingency reserve, energy, and capacity. Based on the physical requirements of the various bulk power system services and the estimated end use electric load shapes, potential availability of demand response is calculated and provided as a series of csv files.
Array↗
Grid Mix Explorer Version 4
The NETL Grid Mix Explorer allows users to browse regional electricity grid mixes and resulting generation and consumption life cycle inventory and impact data, as well as configure customized mixes of technologies and results. Data is aggregated to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Market Regions (10) or Balancing Authority Area (BA) region (68). This generation mix represents the amount of electricity produced by each power plant type in that region. Note that this can be different than the mix that the region actually uses for electricity (consumption mix). The consumption mix includes the net imports from the various BAs into the selected region. Finally, the tool provides a comparison of the generation and consumption mixes of each of the subregions. As noted above, there can be a significant differences between the two, and the consumption mix is a more accurate reflection of the electricity actually being consumed in an area.
Source record↗
Balancing Area Coordination: Efficiently Integrating Renewable Energy Into the Grid, Greening the Grid
Greening the Grid provides technical assistance to energy system planners, regulators, and grid operators to overcome challenges associated with integrating variable renewable energy into the grid. Coordinating balancing area operation can promote more cost and resource efficient integration of variable renewable energy, such as wind and solar, into power systems. This efficiency is achieved by sharing or coordinating balancing resources and operating reserves across larger geographic boundaries.
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
Benefit Cost Analysis of Improved Forecasting for Day-Ahead Hourly Regulation Requirements
A benefit cost analysis (BCA) of the Day-Ahead Regulation Prediction (DARP) tool found substantial savings to providing an improved forecast of the California Independent System Operators (CAISO) reserve requirements for regulation services with increasing amounts of solar generation. DARP predicts day-ahead reserve requirements for Regulation Up (Reg Up) and Regulation Down (Reg Down) using the balancing authority’s Area Control Error (ACE) and actual frequency. The BCA approach statistically estimated the price-quantity relationships for Reg Up and Reg Down. The estimated changes in Regulation reserve prices along with the estimated changes in day-ahead reserve requirements, forecast by DARP, provide a cost savings estimate. The results indicate that more savings were found for reducing Reg Up than reducing Reg Down purchases. A similar approach may be used to estimate savings from improved forecasting of reserves for other ancillary services, or to estimate benefits from other forecasting tools and methodologies.
Ancillary Services, Benefit Cost Analysis, Frequen↗
Input data to electricity_entity_boundaries workflow
The EIA 861 electricity entity information dataset which acts as the input data to the electricity_entity_boundaries workflow (https://github.com/IMMM-SFA/electricity_entity_boundaries).
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
Empirical Indicators of Transmission Value in the Southeast United States
Concurrent differences in energy price between different parts of the electric grid are a key indicator of the value of additional transmission. In areas without a wholesale electricity market, such as the Southeast, an alternative indicator to price is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) system lambda data. This economic metric represents the minimized marginal production costs of thermal generators, including fuel and other variable operation and maintenance expenses. Balancing Authorities report a single system lambda for their entire balancing area. Most Southeastern lambdas exhibit sufficient price variation to support a transmission valuation analysis, although incomplete accounting of congestion costs or scarcity rents during peak load hours may underestimate the true value of transmission capacity. With transmission value defined as the annual average hourly absolute price difference between two regions and FERC’s system lambda data used as a price proxy, we find the following results in the Southeast region during 2012-2023 (reported in $\$2024$/MWh): Intra‐regional findings: Annual averages historically span $\$2$–$\$28$/MWh and average $\$12$/MWh in SERTP and span $\$4$–$\$19$/MWh and average $\$9$/MWh in FRCC, disregarding transmission value driven by anomalous data. The ranges of transmission value reported here are large, spanning an order of magnitude in some cases. Much of this variation is driven by year-to-year changes, with 2022 having a particularly high intra-regional transmission value due to elevated natural gas prices. Inter‐regional corridors: Annual average transmission values across three broader regions range from $\$6$ to $\$28$/MWh with a long-term average of $\$11$/MWh. Much of the transmission value is concentrated in a small portion of hours. Across all regions, severe weather—particularly polar vortex events in January 2018, February 2021, and December 2022—drives the largest price spreads. Seasonal patterns also emerge, with summer afternoons and fall mornings contributing consistently to transmission value, as for example between MISO and SOCO in 2023.
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
Deployment Potential of Concentrating Solar Power Technologies in California
As states within the United States respond to future grid development goals, there is a growing demand for reliable and resilient nighttime generation that can be addressed by low-cost, long-duration energy storage solutions. This report studies the potential of including concentrating solar power (CSP) in the technology mix to support California’s goals as defined in Senate Bill 100. A joint agency report study that determined potential pathways to achieve the renewable portfolio standard set by the bill did not include CSP, and our work provides information that could be used as a follow-up. This study uses a capacity expansion model configured to have nodal spatial fidelity in California and balancing-area fidelity in the Western Interconnection outside of California. The authors discovered that by applying current technology cost projections CSP fulfills nearly 15% of the annual load while representing just 6% of total installed capacity in 2045, replacing approximately 30 GWe of wind, solar PV, and standalone batteries compared to a scenario without CSP included. The deployment of CSP in the results is sensitive to the technology’s cost, which highlights the importance of meeting cost targets in 2030 and beyond to enable the technology’s potential contribution to California’s carbon reduction goals.
14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
Improving BA Control Performance Through Advanced Regulation Requirements Prediction
The paper presents a comprehensive approach to predict balancing authority (BA) regulation requirements in order to improve BAs control performance. The proposed probabilistic approach takes into account multiple uncertain and time dependent factors affecting the system balance (e.g., wind and solar generation, electrical loads). A set of methods to predict the regulation has been developed: (1) probabilistic analysis of regulation requirements with respect to time of the day, (2) linear or nonlinear regression models linking regulation requirements to different influencing factors, (3) adopting time series forecasting techniques (e.g., autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA)) to account for temporal continuity and auto-correlation in the regulation requirements data. Proposed methodology has been tested and validated using actual California Independent System Operator (ISO) data.
Solar Generation, Wind Generation, Area Control Er↗
Earth Energy Balance Assessment at the 2022 BIPM-WMO Metrology for Climate Action Workshop
The BIPM and WMO hosted a five-day workshop in Sept. 2022 to assess the state of current metrology and identify future meteorological needs regarding climate change for the upcoming decade. A resulting broad policy-oriented workshop summary report, written by the workshop’s ~70 international organizers and reviewed by meeting attendees, identifies the current issues in each of nine high-level topic areas and provides recommendations to address them, listing specific needs, pathways, timelines, and responsible agencies or organizations for each. One prominent Topic within the workshop, “Earth Energy Balance,” was organized by the authors of this presentation and resulted in a section of the workshop summary report using the contributions from the topic’s several pre-recorded oral and poster presentations and the outcomes of two interactive real-time community-wide discussion sessions. The Earth-energy-balance topic issues centered on three areas: Radiometric energy measurements, including needed accuracies and stabilities and the use of SI-Traceable Satellites (SITSats), such as CLARREO and TRUTHS, to achieve them; improved on-orbit calibration sources, including the Sun and the Moon, thermal-infrared and UV sources, and space-flight blackbodies; and the four primary Earth-heat storage reservoirs of the oceans, land, permafrost, and cryosphere, giving an inventory of where and how much of the Earth’s energy is stored and how much uptake there is of the incoming energy. This presentation will summarize the results of the Earth Energy Balance topic from the 2022 BIPM-WMO Metrology for Climate Action Workshop.
earth↗
Reactor Physics Experiment NEA Benchmark Possibilities for Measurements at ORCEF and Other DOE Facilities
This report documents a wide variety of critical and subcritical reactor physics measurements that could be included in the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) International Handbook of Evaluated Reactor Physics Benchmark Experiments. The experiments were performed by John T. Mihalczo and coworkers at many (8) DOE facilities including the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Critical Experiments Facility (ORCEF between 1958 and 1975), Los Alamos National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Babcock and Wilcox at Lynchburg, Virginia, and the Y-12 National Security Complex (the latter between 1975 and up to 2006). This report lists the various measurement programs and a limited description of the reactor physics measurement that were performed in each that could be benchmarks. Some criticality safety measurements at these facilities have already been documented in the NEA International Handbook of evaluated Criticality Safety Benchmark Experiments. Some of these reactor physics measurements have also been documented in the literature and this document give a complete list of references for which John T. Mihalczo was an author or co-author. The experiments are divided into four classes: critical experiments only, critical and subsequent subcritical experiments, subcritical experiments at critical facilities, and subcritical measurements performed in material balance areas of the Y-12 National Security Complex (NSC) and other facilities. Because of the high cost and large amount of facility time related to these measurements, it is very cost-effective to mine the existing data to produce NEA reactor physics benchmarks. The information for many of these measurements is documented in critical experiment and subcritical experiment logbooks at the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Program at Idaho National Laboratory and in Laboratory Records at Oak Ridge National laboratory.
22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
Characterizing HVDC Transmission Flexibility under Extreme Operating Conditions
System operators rely on system flexibility, traditionally mainly from generation, to handle unexpected reliability and resilience events, ranging from excessive resource forecast errors to extreme events like heatwaves, earthquakes, and cyberattacks. Flexible transmission, such as controllable high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission systems present an opportunity to increase overall system flexibility to accommodate operational challenges. This paper provides a methodology to study contributions to system flexibility by controllable, power electronics based transmission. The Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) system is used as an example to study contributions from existing and future HVDC lines. Under extreme system conditions, it is identified that HVDC transmission flexibility can contribute with 24.8 to 28% of avoided unserved energy, and in some areas, the benefits amount to 50 to 70%.
HVDC transmission, PCM, Balancing authorities↗
Evaluate ERTS imagery for mapping and detection of changes of snowcover on land and on glaciers
The author has identified the following significant results. A possibly more accurate method to determine snowcover area change has been tried; snowcover area change over periods of an ERTS-1 cycle are very useful in determining energy balances over regional areas and to determine snow depth as a function of altitude. Also since shadow and cloud cover areas are highlighted this method may be a step toward more complete machine processing.
Meier, M. F.↗
Three-Stage Production Cost Modeling Approach for Evaluating the Benefits of Intra-Hour Scheduling Between Balancing Authorities
This paper introduces a production cost modeling approach for evaluating the benefits of intra-hour scheduling among Balancing Authorities (BAs). System operation is modeled in a three-stage sequential manner: day ahead (DA)-hour ahead (HA) real time (RT). In addition to contingency reserve, each BA will need to carry out 'up' and 'down' load following and regulation reserve capacity requirements in the DA and HA time frames. In the RT simulation, only contingency and regulation reserves are carried out as load following is deployed. To model current RT operation with hourly schedules, a new constraint was introduced to force each BA net exchange schedule deviation from HA schedules to be within North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) area control error (ACE) limits. Case studies that investigate the benefits of moving from hourly exchange schedules between Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) BAs into 10-minute exchange schedules under two different levels of wind and solar penetration (11% and 33%) are presented.
17 WIND ENERGY↗
Evaluate ERTS imagery for mapping and detection of changes of snowcover on land and on glaciers
The author has identified the following significant results. A new procedure to determine snowcovered areas has been devised. Aside from problems in heavily forested areas this method shows promise in predicting snowmelt runoff from mountain areas and will also assist in energy balance modeling of large snowfields. Snowcover results compare favorably with measurements made by high altitude aircraft photography. Changes in snowcover in areas as small as 3 x 5 km can be determined from ERTS-1 images by both optical and electronic methods. Snowcover changes determined by these two methods in the experimental South Cascade Glacier Basin were verified by field mapping. Image enahancement techniques on ERTS-1 images of large Alaskan glaciers (the Hubbard, Yentna, and Kahiltna) have given new insights into the large-scale structures and flow dynamics of these potentially hazardous glaciers. The Hubbard Glacier, in particular, is one which poses a threat to man and should be monitored for future changes.
Meier, M. F.↗