Synonymous and inconsistent region names for some electricity grid regions

[artur-donaldson-ocl]

Description:

The electricity baseline package contains inconsistencies in regional naming and ID assignments, potentially leading to confusion and impacting the accuracy of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) models. Several regions appear to represent the same physical area with differing names and IDs. This ticket aims to help harmonize region naming

Impact: medium
Priority: low

Specific Issues Identified:

• Two distinct entries exist:

  • ISO New England (33f34c60-eba4-3a50-a053-f9a316c4bd94) and ISO-NE (82a4dfd3-c69f-3575-a0be-d87672ff0410)

  • SPP (26fb896c-4bff-3631-a51b-e58b6bbaa620) and Southwest Power Pool (786ce9d5-f538-3dc2-a72c-3a806b499f1c)

  • PJM (a6398302-30f3-35ab-a6ce-334affec30c6) and PJM Interconnection, LLC (3f99201b-2080-3094-8c19-964ab402da70)

  • CAISO (651e6ca8-1c80-3a92-b105-50750526358b) and California Independent System Operator (c72f5655-cf56-3878-a286-df2a9e70dc5a)

• Recommendation: Clarify the relationship between each pair of IDs. Are they distinct geographical regions, sufficiently distinct to warrant different characterization factors (e.g. for water withdrawal indicators)

• US Northwest: Two entries exist with the same name:

  • US Northwest (f5fa4a79-2bf1-42fd-bc42-1a4a2ae8c306)
  • US Northwest (5ed8b4b2-a7db-31d9-9cb3-c031904e3d7c) – Recommendation: Rename one of these entries to clearly differentiate them. The description indicates this covers area west of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state and Oregon; a more descriptive name is needed.

• Naming Consistency: The naming convention for electricity regions is inconsistent (e.g., "PUD No. 1 of Douglas County" vs. “Public Utility District No. 2 of Grant County, Washington”). Recommendation: Establish a standardized naming convention for all electricity regions to improve clarity and maintainability.

Investigation / Discussion:

• BA & FERC Regions: These IDs likely represent Bulk Assessment (BA) and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) regions.
• Regional Boundary Significance: It’s impactful to determine if these regional differences are significant enough to warrant separate characterization within an LCA model. Further investigation is needed to assess the potential impact of these variations on model results.

(originally posted in USLCI repo, re-posted on recommendation of the repo maintainers, with improvements)

[dt-woods]

Thanks for posting the issue, @artur-donaldson-ocl! You are correct that what I considered "homographs" (e.g., ISO New England and ISO-NE) are derivatives of U.S. balancing authority and FERC region naming.

Taking a closer look:

• FERC Map: https://www.ferc.gov/media/regions-map-printable-version-order-no-1000
• BA Map: https://www.gridinfo.com/balancing-authority/iso-new-england

Very likely these are, in fact, synonymous, and, sadly, the metadata for these regions is insufficient to describe the relationship that you pointed out. Our team updated regional metadata in version 3, and, I agree, that there are more updates to be made. I'll be sure to add this to our priority list in this year's maintenance.

By the way, I'm not familiar with regional distinctions associated with water withdrawal indicators and their relationship to the electricity regions provided in eLCI. Do you have a reference for more information?

Also, I don't have a "US Northwest" region (I have Northwest - NW, which is a FERC region); I will follow up with @bl-young to see if that was a part of the metadata corrections and see if we can get that solved.

[bl-young]

I think this issue would have been from the 2022 edition (v2.0) so may not be fully relevant anymore. I don't think the duplicate Northwest region exists anymore.