FERC Form 1 expense category details

[emmanueld27]

Howdy. I was looking through the data dictionary for the dataset labeled "out_ferc1__yearly_all_plants", and I don't know whether production expenses include operations and/or maintenance. It's not easy to tell. Some categories like "opex_production_total" are labelled as total operating expenses but others are labelled differently, such as the category labelled "opex_operations" which defines "Production expenses: operations, supervision, and engineering (USD)." I also wanted to know whether opex_operations included labor cost for engineering.

I wanted to determine the accounting profit of a power plant based on these factors, but it is hard to tell which overall category each belongs in the factors of cost (O&M, production, labor).

Does anybody know or have a clue?

[zaneselvans]

Hello @emmanueld27! So the out_ferc1__yearly_all_plants table is a composite of several FERC 1 tables describing plants. Unfortunately each table reports slightly (or sometimes very) different attributes, or aggregates them in different ways, so this table has some least-common-denominator columns that try to make them all comparable. It might be easier to start by looking at one of the original tables in isolation.

The only plant table that has a lot of detail about the plant's cost structure is the large steam plants, and it contains the overwhelming majority of the generating capacity that's reported in here. We've categorized the expenses as CapEx and OpEx (each of which has several sub-categories) based on their original column names. In the past we've attempted to pick apart the OpEx to understand which categories are "fixed" (proportional to capacity) and which are "variable" (proportional to generation) but even after binning by the type of plant and vintage of plant, they didn't end up having clear categorizations. Also, many utilities do a lot of ongoing capital additions year after year that sure do smell like maintenance, but get treated as CapEx for accounting purposes and quietly put into the rate base.

Our column descriptions are pretty terse because we wrote them based on the old, undocumented DBF data before FERC switched to publishing this data as XBRL. The XBRL taxonomy has richer descriptions (which we should bring over!) which you can explore through the FERC taxonomy viewer. PUDL matches the old DBF and new XBRL data column-by-column so all 30+ years of data are available in a single table.

Unfortunately, almost all of the FERC data (other than this handful of relatively messy plant tables) is reported at the utility rather than plant level, so the detailed asset/liability income/expense tables with clear accounting categories can't tell you much about the individual plants.

FERC's fuel consumption and net generation reporting is also not nearly as granular as the EIA data. We've compiled a crosswalk connecting the FERC & EIA plants, but it's complex, because FERC doesn't have a consistent notion of what constitutes a "plant" -- it varies from respondent to respondent, and even from year to year within a single respondent.

[emmanueld27]

Thank you so much for replying. It helped clear some stuff up for me.