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Oil Change International State DEM Project
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Edison International in CA ≠ coal? #94

Open dturnbull opened 10 years ago

dturnbull commented 10 years ago

So I noticed that "Edison International" is a big DEM player in California, but realize that this is likely Southern California Edison...which is the utility in Southern Cal, of course. They have only something like <10%, but something like 37% Nat Gas in their energy mix (and close to 20% renewables). But in DEM they are listed as "coal" in CA because Edison International is big on coal in other places, presumably. I'm not sure how the classifications work, but wondering if this should be changed?

michalgm commented 10 years ago

Are you asking that we change edison international's overall classification, or we just change it for CA? The latter would be a larger change, since we don't do any state-level metadata for companies now. Looking in the database, all of their contributions are coded by nimsp as 'electric utilities'. It appears we coded them as coal because they were matched on name against the federal DEM database, where they are coded as coal because we added them from a list of companies we got from Appalachian Voices. Should they be coded as 'oil' in both the state and federal databases?

On 10/08/2013 11:36 AM, dturnbull wrote:

So I noticed that "Edison International" is a big DEM player in California, but realize that this is likely Southern California Edison...which is the utility in Southern Cal, of course. They have only something like <10%, but something like 37% Nat Gas in their energy mix (and close to 20% renewables). But in DEM they are listed as "coal" in CA because Edison International is big on coal in other places, presumably. I'm not sure how the classifications work, but wondering if this should be changed?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/michalgm/state_dem/issues/94.

stanleyjones commented 10 years ago

Looks like this needs an answer. Assigning it to David.

stanleyjones commented 10 years ago

Definitely not code them differently by state. Can we create a Utility or Mixed sector and apply that? David thinks that Oil Change might be able to walk through the database and pull other companies into that sector.

michalgm commented 10 years ago

Adding another category is a pretty significant operation. We can do it, but it will take a lot of work - there's a lot of different place in the code that will need updated, both backend and UI. We should probably only do that if OC decides that is a better way of presenting information, not to solve this particular issue. One immediate problem I can foresee is that since we are sharing the companies data between state and federal, we may need to add this category to the federal DEM site. I might be able to separate out the categorization, but it could get ugly.

skyebend commented 10 years ago

We do have an existing 3rd category "Carbon" for things we can't classify as oil or coal. But it is important to remember that this oil vs. coal is a pretty crude classification which is mostly a legacy from when we had two separate sites. For many companies it just which ever contribution category is greater (i.e $1 more of CRP-tagged coal contribs makes a company coal instead of oil). And the company hierarchy aggregation is pretty crude as well. But since we are barely able to keep up with the current level of tagging and coding, I don't think its worth trying to increase the resolution unless we can identify both good sources of data person-hours.

stanleyjones commented 10 years ago

Moving this out of Phase 3 since it doesn't look like we have a solution.