lcford2 / eia_data_portal

EIA API Data Portal

This is a small project I started to help automate the process of pulling data from the EIA. The EIA provides a ton of useful information for energy systems modeling and other uses, and its web interface is actually really nice and intuitive. However, when you need a lot of data it can be cumbersome to navigate through their website to get all of the information you want. This project simply provides a easy method to do that. It is not perfect, but I use it all the time and you might find that it helps you too.

The hallmarks of this project are:

• Use of EIA's Data Access API
  • Requiring each user to have their own API key.
• Date parsing functionality that tries to convert the datetime strings provided by EIA to datetime objects
  • With the ability for users to add their own parsing formats easily
• Coercing raw data into pandas DataFrames and storing them as CSV files
• Storing meta data about the retrieved data series in series_records.json for reference

The first step after you clone this repository is to request a API key from EIA. After you have your API key, create a file in this directory called api_key.txt that contains your API key in the first line and nothing else.

After that, you can browse the series_records.json file for a data series you may be interested in or you can look through EIA's data catalog for a more comprehensive list of possible data series. Once you have a series id you want to download (e.g. EBA.CAL-ALL.NG.SUN.HL, which is the Net Generation (NG) from Solar (SUN) at an hourly resolution in local time (HL) for all of California (CAL-ALL)) you can download it by running the get_eia_data.py script in the src directory (e.g. $ python get_eia_data.py EBA.CAL-ALL.NG.SUN.HL). Note: you must first be in the src directory for the script to execute properly.

Similarly, you can run the get_regional_gen.py script from the src directory (e.g $ python get_regional_gen.py) to pull generation information from various regions across the US, split up by generation type.

Both scripts are setup to store the CSV output files in the output directory.

Python Help

This project is built using Python 3.8 and a few Python libraries. It's external dependencies are:

• numpy
• pandas
• dateutil

Other libraries used are included as part of the Python standard library.

The easiest way to get started if you do not already use Python is Miniconda. Miniconda is a minimal installer that includes Python, the conda package manager, and a few dependencies. You can also use Anaconda, which is similar to Miniconda, but it automatically installes a large number of commonly used libraries that take up a lot of disk space on your computer. I find Miniconda to be less bloated.

Once you have installed one of these (either Miniconda or Anaconda) and followed the instructions for setting up your command line environment to recognize conda commands, you can simply create a conda environment with all the correct dependencies for this project by running the command $ conda env create -f environment.yml from within the project directory.