aegean-ai/ercot-uri-load-temperature

ERCOT load and Texas temperature, winter 2020-21

Hourly electricity load of the ERCOT grid, which serves most of Texas, together with hourly air temperature at eight Texas airports, from 27 November 2020 to 24 February 2021 (Central time). The window contains Winter Storm Uri. From the early hours of 15 February 2021 ERCOT shed load to keep the grid from collapsing, so the load it reports for those hours is the load it served, well below what customers would have drawn.

The table is built for teaching robust regression. A model of normal demand fitted to a window that includes the storm is pulled toward the shed hours, and those hours are also colder than any hour of the ordinary winter. It is used in the least squares with outliers section of the aegean.ai book.

File

data/ercot_hourly.parquet, 2,160 rows, one per hour, with no missing hours.

Column	Type	Meaning
timestamp_utc	timestamp, UTC	Start of the hour
timestamp_local	timestamp, America/Chicago	Start of the hour in Central time (the window has no daylight saving change)
window	string	train (1 Dec 2020 to 7 Feb 2021), control (8 to 13 Feb), event (14 to 19 Feb), or margin (the days before and after)
load_mw	float	ERCOT system native load for the hour, MW
temp_f	float	Mean of the eight station temperatures, °F
hour, dow	int8	Hour of day (0 to 23) and day of week (0 = Monday) in Central time
n_stations	int8	Number of stations with a temperature for the hour (8 for every row)
temp_<zone>_f	float	Temperature at the station for each ERCOT weather zone, °F
load_<zone>_mw	float	ERCOT native load of each weather zone, MW; the eight sum to load_mw

Sources

Load comes from the ERCOT hourly load data archive, files Native_Load_2020.zip and Native_Load_2021.zip. ERCOT reports each hour by its ending time; here row t is the hour that starts at t.

Temperature comes from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information Integrated Surface Database, Global Hourly, read from NOAA's open-data bucket on AWS. One airport represents each ERCOT weather zone:

Weather zone	Station	ISD id
Coast	Houston Intercontinental (KIAH)	72243012960
East	Tyler Pounds Regional (KTYR)	72244813972
Far West	Midland International (KMAF)	72265023023
North	Wichita Falls / Sheppard AFB (KSPS)	72351013966
North Central	Dallas/Fort Worth International (KDFW)	72259003927
South Central	Austin-Bergstrom International (KAUS)	72254013904
Southern	Corpus Christi International (KCRP)	72251012924
West	Abilene Regional (KABI)	72266013962

The hourly temperature of a station is the mean of its routine and special METAR reports (FM-15 and FM-16) inside the hour. Reports with quality codes 2, 3, 6 or 7 are dropped, and gaps of up to three hours are filled by linear interpolation. temp_f is the unweighted mean over the eight stations, so it describes the state as a whole and is not weighted by population or load.

Reproducing

bash scripts/download.sh raw
python scripts/build.py raw out    # needs pandas, openpyxl and pyarrow

build.py prints row counts, the number of hours with fewer than eight stations, and a check that the zone loads sum to the system load.

Terms

The load data are raw data from public portions of the ERCOT website. Section 5 of the ERCOT terms of use allows such raw data to be used, reproduced and redistributed in compilations, charts and analyses. ERCOT does not guarantee the accuracy of compilations such as this one. The temperature observations are NOAA data from US stations and carry no restrictions on use. This compilation and its scripts are released under CC BY 4.0.

Limitations

The load during shedding is the load ERCOT served, so the gap between a model's prediction and the served load estimates unserved demand only as well as the model can be trusted at temperatures it was not fitted on. Eight airports stand in for the weather of a large state, and the mean over them is not weighted by where the load is.