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

1. Clone the repo: https://github.com/GODEEEP/future-energy-droughts
2. Unzip ba-aggregated.zip into data/, this is required to run future-energy-droughts.R
3. 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 <drought type>_droughts_ba_<data period>_<infrastructure year>_<infrastructure scenario>_<time scale>.csvwhere <data period> is either historical or future, <infrastructure year> is any 5 year increment between 2020 and 2050, <infrastructure scenario> is either bau (business as usual) or nz (net zero), and <time scale> 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_<data period>_<infrastructure year>_<infrastructure scenario>_<time scale>.csv where <data period> is either historical or future, <infrastructure year> is any 5 year increment between 2020 and 2050, <infrastructure scenario> is either bau (business as usual) or nz (net zero), and <time scale> 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.