catalyst-cooperative / pudl

The Public Utility Data Liberation Project provides analysis-ready energy system data to climate advocates, researchers, policymakers, and journalists.
https://catalyst.coop/pudl
MIT License
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Create notebook exploring bias in load growth projections #3910

Open zaneselvans opened 2 weeks ago

zaneselvans commented 2 weeks ago

Overview

Regulated utilities have a habit of overestimating load growth, in order to justify expanding their rate base. @arengel at RMI did a little exploration of this in 2017 in The Billion Dollar Costs of Forecasting Electricity Demand and it has become relevant once again with the rush to build gas plants and delay coal plant retirements in order to serve "hyperscale" data centers and AI training. To what extent are utilities simply taking advantage of the hype around this narrative to justify "emergency" build out of new fossil infrastructure? Data reported by planning areas in the FERC-714 can provide some context, and would also provide a nice example analysis notebook for our PUDL Examples repo.

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Background Reading

zaneselvans commented 4 days ago

Hey @nilaykumar just comment in here if you run into anything strange or have questions about the data or electricity system background (it looks like I can't assign the issue to you until you've engaged with it though)