How important is the combinator concat and clean upstream and plant method?

[dt-woods]

The basic workflow for ELCI_1 skips this concat and clean method:

https://github.com/USEPA/ElectricityLCI/blob/e56268132f7607ead58a33bb5bdd525563a784f5/electricitylci/combinator.py#L313

This happens on L66 in get_generation_process_df, where combined_df is returned but unused. It appears to be abandoned in favor of add_fuels_to_gen, which does a handful of random things, then concatenates with Canadian generation (skipping the cleaning methods that are described in the method above).

The question is, how important are the database cleaning methods?

There appears to be some region mapping, some construction category assignment, and mixed fuel category assignment.

[m-jamieson]

It doesn't appear all that important now. In earlier iterations of the data, coal and natural gas upstream dataframes weren't formatted correctly, so they required some columns, etc. added so that they could be cleanly added to the power plant dataframes. It looks like only the water use dataframe requires the same treatment. The alternative to keeping this function would be to clean up plant_water_use.py to make the output dataframe consistent with the rest of the tool.