ERCOT Settlement Point and Electrical Bus Mapping

[colinpbowen]

I haven't seen anything under the keywords 'bus', 'settlement point', or 'node' for ERCOT in the datasets list. It would be nice to maintain a list of these. It is admittedly an annoying entity resolution problem, but here are the sources I've found and how I was able to resolve them:

Settlement Points and Electrical Buses Mapping. This contains a zip file of "Settlement Points" (which are actually electrical buses, not all of which receive a unique price) that is n=16582 as of writing; Resource Node to Unit mappings (a list of RNs with multiple units per RN); Hub Names and DC Ties; Non-Opt-In-Entity mappings (which receive an SPP via their specified load zone); and Combined Cycle Plant resource names.

Naturally, a sanity check is to see which nodes/buses receive a settlement point price, which we can check with the DAM settlement point prices dataset, found here. Here, we see n=851.

I was able to uniquely identify the nodes as follows:

1. Take the non-null Resource Nodes named in the list of buses (762 as of the time of writing).
2. Take the list of load zones (there are currently 8).
3. Take the list of hubs and dc ties (11).
4. Take the list of CCP units (70).

Adding these together gives 851. The resource node to unit mappings is a non-exhaustive list of resource nodes (n=691), likely because it doesn't reference RNs with only one unit.

[colinpbowen]

One consideration is that RNs are added and removed over time. Perhaps "first seen" and "last seen" columns would be appropriate.