Getting Started#

On this page you can find important information about the project.

About#

This project was designed to provide public access to monthly data submitted to the Power Cost Equalization (PCE) Program. The PCE data is collected on a monthly basis and includes important information on a community’s generation, costs, sales, and prices (both with and without PCE rate assistance). Having this data available at the monthly level enables researchers to conduct more nuanced analysis, and to look at within-year trends.

This website includes information about the project, the data cleaning, and links to downloading the data. This website also includes the documentation on the data pipeline used to conduct the data cleaning.

See also

If you are looking for more information on the Power Cost Equalization Program, please visit the Alaska Energy Authority Website. There you will find resources on the history of the program, annualized statistics, and program guides.

Data Quality#

The data we receive from the Alaska Energy Authority (AEA) are the original entries for each utility/community in each month. This means that the data includes entry errors. We present the data in two forms:

  1. Uncleaned: This is the original data as received, but the column names have been standardized and calendar dates have been added (the original data comes with fiscal dates).

  2. Cleaned: This is the result of data processing. We make efforts to remove obviously erroneous or impossible data. For more information on the data cleaning process, please visit the Data Cleaning page.

Data Contents#

The data presented here is primarily the output of filling out the AEA’s PCE Utility Monthly Report. For more information on the data included in each dataset, please visit the Data Dictionary page.

⚡️ Alaska Power Cost Equalization Utility Monthly Report Data#

This repository contains the source code for building the Power Cost Equalization (PCE) Utility Monthly Report (UMR) database as well as a documentation website.

⚠️ Warning: This database is under active development. Additionally, the data is reported by utilities to the Alaska Energy Authority and may contain errors. While we take steps to minimize obviously erroneous data in our cleaned version of the data, errors may persist. We make no guarantees about the accuracy of this data.

ℹ️ Important: Documentation Website: acep-uaf.github.io/pce-database/

🛠️ Building the repository locally#

Clone the repository locally (could also fork and then clone):

% git clone git@github.com:acep-uaf/pce-database.git
% cd pce-database

This repo originally used a pair of requirements.txt file to determine the package dependencies for the virtual environment. Now, the environment is built using the definition in pyproject.toml. Either uv or pip can be used. pip install enables use of the script make_database.

uv#

uv sync will create the .venv/ directory. The flag includes the optional dependencies for the sphinx documentation.

% uv sync --all-extras  # Include all optional dependencies.
% source .venv/bin/activate
% uv pip install -e .

pip#

% python -m venv .venv
% source .venv/bin/activate
% pip install -e .
% pip install '.[docs]'

💽 Database Pipeline Execution#

Once the virtual environment is built, you can build the database locally with one of the following commands.

% make_database  # or
% python src/database/main.py

The database and data packages will be built locally and a new log file will replace the old one. The API for the database processes are located on the documentation site.

🛜 Website and Documentation#

The directory docs/ contains the source code for the Sphinx documentation and website. This static website is built to automatically document the database pipeline in ./src/database/. The website contains informational content about the project and download links.

% cd docs
% make html

The static website is then located in ./docs/_build/html/. Opening index.html in a web browser will give you access to the website.

For additional information on ways to use Sphinx, please visit the Sphinx Documentation.

🔭 Funding#

This project was built with support from State of Alaska capital appropriations for the Alaska Energy Data Gateway.

Additional Information#

Learn more about the Alaska Center for Energy and Power.