GODEEEP future energy drought data

This dataset has 3 components, (1) historical and future energy drought data for balancing authorities in the Western US (2) physically consistent wind, solar and load data aggregated to the balacing authority level in the Western US (3) plant level wind and solar generation data for both historical and future scenarios.

For more information please refer to Bracken et al. 2024, Climate change impacts on compound renewable energy droughts under evolving infrastructure in the Western United States, in prep, or refer to the Github repository https://github.com/GODEEEP/future-energy-droughts

Usage

Clone the repo: https://github.com/GODEEEP/future-energy-droughts

Unzip ba-aggregated.zip into data/, this is required to run future-energy-droughts.R

Unzip future-wind-solar.zip into your preferred directory and change the path in the process-data.R script

Energy Drought data

The file future-energy-droughts.zip contains energy drought data for historical and future scenarios. The files have the naming convention _droughts_ba____.csvwhere is either historical or future, is any 5 year increment between 2020 and 2050, is either bau (business as usual) or nz (net zero), and is daily. Several kinds of energy droughts are available:

solar - Solar only droughts defined using a 10th percentile threshold

wind - Wind only droughts defined using a 10th percentile threshold

ws - Wind and solar droughts defined using a 10th percentile threshold

Each drought file has the following columns:

ba - Abbreviated name for the BA

run_id - unique id for each drought event

datetime_utc - Date stamp for the start of the drought, in UTC

timezone - The predominant time zone for the BA

run_length - The length of a drought in time steps

run_length_days - The length of the drought in days

severity_ws - Drought severity for wind and solar droughts, computed using the compound drought magnitude metric

severity_mwh - Drought severity expressed as MWh

zero_prob - For solar, this value indicates if the timestep has zero probability of solar production, i.e. night time

year - The year of the timestep

month - The month of the timestep

hour - The hour of the timestep

wind_cf - Wind capacity factor for the drought

solar_cf - Solar capacity factor for the drought

srepi_solar - Standardized renewable energy production index for solar

srepi_wind - Standardized renewable energy production index for wind

BA level generation data

The file ba-aggregated.zip contains ba level generation data that has been aggregated from plant level data. The files have the naming convention ba____.csv where is either historical or future, is any 5 year increment between 2020 and 2050, is either bau (business as usual) or nz (net zero), and is either hourly or daily.

ba - Abbreviated name for the BA

year - The current year as an integer

period - A unique integer for the current time step

solar_gen_mwh - Aggregated solar generation in units of MWh

solar_capacity_mwh - Aggregated solar plant capacity expresed as MWh

wind_gen_mwh - Aggregated wind generation in units of MWh

wind_capacity_mwh - Aggregated wind plant capacity expresed as MWh

load_mwh - BA load in MWh, not used in this study

load_max_mwh - The maximum BA load over the entire historical period, not used in this study

datetime_utc - Time stamp for the current time step, in UTC, All time stamps are beginning of period.

timezone - The predominant time zone for the BA

wind_cf - Wind capacity factor, wind_gen_mwh/wind_capacity_mwh

solar_cf - Solar capacity factor, wind_gen_mwh/wind_capacity_mwh

load_cf - Load "capacity factor", expresed as a fraction of the maximum BA load, load_mwh/load_max_mwh, not used in this study

Plant level wind and solar generation data

The file future-wind-solar.zip contains hourly plant level generation data used to derive the energy drought data. Each folder contains one csv file per simulated year (eg. solar_gen_cf_2020.csv). The files eia_solar_configs.csv and eia_wind_configs.csv contain metadata for each EIA plant.

baseline-future - 2020 infrastructure under future weather years, 2020-2059

baseline-historical - 2020 infrastructure under historical weather years

baseline-historical-bc - 2020 infrastructure under historical weather years, bias corrected

baseline2020 - 2020 infrastructure under future weather years, 2020-2099

cerf-config - cerf sitings

cerf-future-2040 - cerf sitings run through future climate 2020-2050

cerf-future-2045 - cerf sitings run through future climate 2020-2050

cerf-future-2050 - cerf sitings run through future climate 2020-2050

cerf-historical-2040 - cerf sitings run through historical climate 2020-2050

cerf-historical-2045 - cerf sitings run through historical climate 2020-2050

cerf-historical-2050 - cerf sitings run through historical climate 2020-2050

Funding statement

This research was supported by the Grid Operations, Decarbonization, Environmental and Energy Equity Platform (GODEEEP) Investment, under the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

PNNL is a multi-program national laboratory operated for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) by Battelle Memorial Institute under Contract No. DE-AC05-76RL01830.