Solar and Wind Energy Drought Data for 15 Balancing Authorities in the CONUS

15 Balancing Authorities in the Continental United States are covered by this dataset, which contains physically consistent wind, solar, and load data aggregated from plant-level EIA-860 2020 infrastructure. It also includes pre-computed energy droughts for time scales from 1 hour to 5 days, based on research by Cameron Bracken of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Use Cases

• Modeling compound wind and solar energy droughts based on moving percentile thresholds.
• Analyzing residual load (load minus generation) patterns across different time scales.
• Benchmarking renewable energy capacity factors (wind_cf, solar_cf) against historical load.
• Studying the temporal correlation of generation shortfalls across 1-hour to 5-day durations.

Strengths

• Includes data for 15 distinct Balancing Authorities (BAs) in the CONUS.
• Provides pre-computed drought metrics for 7 different time scales from 1 hour to 5 days.
• Data is physically consistent and aggregated from plant-level EIA-860 2020 infrastructure.
• Offers multiple drought definitions (e.g., lws, rl, solar, wind) for nuanced analysis.

Limitations

• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• The description does not specify the exact temporal coverage (start and end years).

Provenance

Source

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, author Cameron Bracken.

Collection Method

Generation and load data aggregated from plant-level data based on EIA-860 2020 infrastructure.

Geography

Continental United States (CONUS), covering 15 Balancing Authorities.