CONUS-wide Balancing Authority Scale Hydropower Projections from 9505 Third Assessment

Daniel Broman of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory provides historical and projected monthly hydropower generation timeseries for balancing authorities across the contiguous U.S. The dataset extends the Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office's SECURE Water Act Section 9505 Third Assessment and includes data from both federal and non-federal facilities. It is provided in multiple formats, including machine-readable CSV, XLSX, and CSV files organized by balancing authority.

Use Cases

• Projecting future hydropower generation under different climate scenarios based on global climate model (gcm) and downscaling method (ds) variables.
• Analyzing historical hydropower generation trends at the balancing authority scale based on monthly modeled_generation_MWh data.
• Comparing hydrological model outputs for hydropower simulation based on the described hydrology model (model) and hydropower model (hp) columns.
• Assessing the impact of different meteorological forcings on energy generation based on the forcing column present in the data.

Strengths

• Includes both historical data and climate projection scenarios, facilitating trend and impact analysis.
• Covers balancing authorities across the entire contiguous United States (CONUS).
• Data is provided in three separate formats (CSV, XLSX, CSV by authority) to accommodate different user preferences.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred from the high-level description after download.
• Row count, file size, and last update date are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The description mentions specific modeling details are in an external article and metarepository, requiring additional steps for full context.

Provenance

Source

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, extending the Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office's SECURE Water Act Section 9505 Third Assessment.

Collection Method

Modeled timeseries derived from hydrological and hydropower models driven by meteorological forcings.

Geography

Contiguous United States (CONUS), at the balancing authority scale.