A Guide to EIA Electric Power Data
Release Date: March 23, 2018
Introduction
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) collects a wide range of data on the electric power industry in the United States. Because of the regulatory history of the electric power industry, EIA's electric power data are almost entirely non-confidential. This guide describes the data that EIA collects and how the data are made available to the public.
The guide is presented in four major sections:
I. Published Aggregate Data: This section discusses EIA's publications of aggregated electricity data.
II. Description of Electricity Data that EIA Collects, Estimates, and Forecasts: This section describes the major types of electricity data that EIA collects, estimates, and forecasts and where EIA publishes the data. The data include:
- Information about electric power plants, including
- Power plant characteristics (Form EIA-860)
- Power plant operations (Form EIA-923)
- Power plant environmental controls and estimated emissions
- Retail sales by utilities and power marketers (Form EIA-861)
- Estimates of electricity generation from small-scale solar PV installations
- Electricity imports and exports with Canada and Mexico (Form EIA-111)
- Reliability information about the electricity supply (Form EIA-411)
- Hourly electricity demand, demand forecast, net generation, and the interchange between electricity systems (Form EIA-930)
- Forecasts of the future of the electricity industry
These sources include hundreds of data elements. For a complete list and explanation of all the data items collected, see the electric power survey forms and instructions, available on EIA's website at
https://www.eia.gov/survey/#electricity.
III. EIA Electricity Data Resources: This section describes information resources that EIA provides to the public to facilitate access to and understanding of the data. These resources include:
- Detailed data files in Excel format
- Web applications that allow the public to interact with and visualize EIA's electricity data
- Wholesale daily electricity price index data for selected price hubs
- Today In Energy, daily articles and graphs on the EIA homepage
- Social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter
The web pages that report these data include explanations of the file layouts and contents for current and historical data. In some cases, these descriptions are in the zip folders that contain the downloadable data sets.
IV. Imputation (Estimation) Used by Electricity Surveys: The final section describes EIA's use of statistical imputation in the context of its electricity surveys.