Explain and examine the data directly and also develop appropriate metrics and analysis to understand the issues at hand.

In February 2021, Texas experienced one of the most massive blackouts and failure of an electric grid in U.S. history – resulting a number of deaths and major economic damage. A number of possible reasons for this failure have developed and some accusations have revolved around wind and solar generation as a possible reason for the failure. As data analysts, we can examine the data directly and also develop appropriate metrics and analysis to understand the issues at hand. This is a good test case as to how data analysts work and also how we can explore real world issues in a large and significant market for energy in the United States.
The good news is that the data is publicly available – what is called “Open Data” – so we can take a critical look at the data directly.
The Project:
I would like you to examine the detailed data from the Texas Electric Grid. The Texas Electrical Grid is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) – and they have a significant amount of data available for our review (http://www.ercot.com).
Two basic files are listed below – you can either download them from our class web site – or go to ERCOT directly and download the files from their web site.
The data on demand for electric by geographic region in Texas in provided in the file: Texas_Native_Load_2021 – raw data – the data is also available directly from ERCOT: http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/load/load_hist This file contains the data for the major regions as provided by ERCOT.
We also have data on the production of electricity in Texas by 15 minute intervals for 2021 by method of generation.
TexasIntGenByFuel2021 – the data is also available directly from ERCOT:
http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation
Once you have downloaded the data – you can use Excel or other analytical tools to construct various graphs, tables and statistics to explore what happened in terms of production of electricity as well as demand during this period. The purpose of this project is to help you develop skills in graphing and data summarization that are useful in business applications.
You should develop a 4 – page report that outlines the key data that was helpful in exploring the conditions in the Texas Electrical Market in January to March 2021.

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