Hourly wind and solar generation profiles for every EIA 2020 plant in the CONUS

Historical hourly time series of wind and solar generation profiles for every plant within the United States (US) that is part of the Energy Information Administration (EIA) 2020 dataset for the years 1980 through 2022. The data uses regional atmospheric climate model simulations and 2020 wind and solar power plant configurations across the entire contiguous US. This data is designed to be be aggregated to the Balancing Authority (BA) scale, or to other scales such as to the nodes of a production cost model which would allow the data to be used to perform reliability assessments and evaluations of technology innovation. There are ongoing efforts to extend this dataset for future climate projections, which additionally require the projection of future infrastructure under a wide range of uncertainties. This historical dataset is a benchmark for those projections and can be used to understand sensitivity to historical inter-annual variability, seasonality, and recent extreme events.

For more information please refer to the Scientific Data paper and the code repository.

The dataset consists of two components:

• Plant configuration files - The plant configuration files (eia_solar_configs.csv and eia_wind_configs.csv) contain all the plant data that is relevant to a generation model, derived from EIA 860 2020 data. Each row corresponds to a single logical plant. In some cases actual plants were split into two logical plants for modeling purposes.
• Generation data files - The generation data resides in the solar/ and wind/ directories and consists of one file per year. Each year contains an 8760 (hourly) profile of generation for every plant. The first column in each csv file is the datetime in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and the subsequent columns correspond to the plant_code_unique column in the configuration files. Data in these generation files is expressed as a capacity factor, which is generation divided by the plant capacity. To obtain the actual Megawatts (MW) generated, multiply the capacity factor for a plant by the value in the system_capacity column from the respective configuration file.

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.

Version v1.1.0 adds bias corrected solar and extends the data through 2022

Version 1.1.1 adds missing wind years 2021 and 2022

Citation: 

• Bracken, Cameron, Underwood, Scott, Campbell, Allison, Thurber, Travis B, & Voisin, Nathalie. (2023). Hourly wind and solar generation profiles for every EIA 2020 plant in the CONUS (v1.1.1) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7901614

Corresponding Author:

• Cameron Bracken, cameron.bracken@pnnl.gov