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Government Information Quarterly

Symposium Issue on the Energy Information Administration

Volume 10, Number 1, 1993

An Analytical History of EIA
Calvin A. Kent ............................................................................................... 3

EIA's Role in the Analysis of the Clean Air Act Arnendments of 1990
and the Development of the National Allowance Database
J. Alan Beamon and Michael J. Linders ........................................................ 25

National Energy Modeling System
C. William Skinner ...................................................................................... 41

Objective Information About Energy Models
Douglas R. Hale ............................................................................................ 53

The Coal Reserves Database Program
Richard Bonskowski .................................................................................... 63

The Role of Focus Groups in the Identification of
User Needs and Data Availability
Lynda T. Carlson, Dwight K. French, and John L. Preston ......................... 89

Integrating Energy Data for Policy Analysis
Barbara T. Fichman ............................................................................... 101

EIA's Approach to Information Quality
Stanley R. Freedman .................................................................... 119

Policy Analysis Without Data
Douglas R. Hale and Larry R. Spancake ............................................................. 129

Disclosure Avoidance Techniques Used In Petroleum Marketing Data
Michael J. Griffey and Jacob Bournazian ......................................................... 135

Contributors ............................................................................................... 149

Calvin A. Kent

This article traces the development of the Energy Information Administration (EIA) from 1974, the inception of its precursor, an office within the Federal Energy Administration, to its current form as an independent agency within the U.S. Department of En ergy (DOE). EIA amalgamated the energy-related activities of over 50 separate agencies, when it was chartered in DOE in 1977, " to collect, evaluate, assemble, and analyze energy information...." Six tensions have characterized the agency during its hist ory: data quality, the role of modeling, confidentiality of data, resources and requirements, the independence of EIA, and timeliness vs. accuracy.

J. Alan Beamon
Michael J. Linders

Throughout 1990 the Energy Information Administration (EIA) provided continuous data and analytic support to Congress during its deliberations on Title IV of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (CAA). This effort called for the pooling of information fro m a wide variety of sources about utility fuel use, capacity, generation, plant configurations, and other operational data. It also called for extensive analytic effort to estimate the impacts of the provisions of the CAA on the electricity and coal marke ts. After the CAA was enacted in November 1990, EIA assisted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the development of the National Allowance Catabase. EIA compiled data for all utility units that have announced plans to come on line by December 31, 1995. The EPA will use these data to calculate th final allocation of sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission allowances among all affected generating units in the United States. This process illustrates how an independent government statistical agency, while not directly involved in policy formulation, can provide support and assistance to policymakers in the development and implementation of laws.
While the provisions of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (CAA) were still being debated, Congress requested the Energy Information Administration (EIA) to review and analyze the sections that would affect electric utilities, specifically those rel ating to acid deposition (Title IV). By providing knowledgeable and impartial analysis, EIA clarified the likely effects of the various legislative proposals and helped Congress finalize amendments.

C. William Skinner

The Energy Information Administration is developing a new National Energy Modeling System to provide annual forecasts of energy supply, demand, and prices on a regional basis in the United States and, to a limited extent, in the rest of the world. The des ign for the system was based on a requirement analysis, a comparison of requirements with existing modeling capabilities, and a series of widely circulated issue papers defining the choices and tradeoffs for 13 key design decisions. An initial prototype o f the new NEMS was implemented in late 1992, with a more complete, operational version in 1993. NEMS is expected to provide EIA and other users with a greatly enhanced ability to illustrate quickly and effectively the effects of a wide range of energy pol icy proposals.

Douglas R. Hale

This article describes the Energy Information Administration's program to develop objective information about its modeling systems without hindering model development and applications, and within budget and human resource constraints.

Richard Bonskowski

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) initiated the Coal Reserves Data Base (CRDB) Program in October, 1990 in order to update and improve the inherent applicability of EIA's national coal reserves database. Currently, EIA's database is derived from the demonstrated reserve base (DRB) of coal, a compilation of data from published sources, unified by adherence to standardized physical criteria of minabil ity, but never intended for the detailed coal supply and policy analyses demanded today. The CRDB Program is designed to engage the expertise available at State geological surveys in compiling best current State-level estimates of both quantities and qual ity of available coal reserves through cooperative agreements with EIA. The CRDB emphasizes integration of more data on coal quality, use of data from unpublished sources, cooperation with industry and other government sources, and flexibility of criteri a to take into account local accessibility and mining conditions and utilize computerized geographic information systems or coal resource software. The results of pilot projects in Ohio and Wyoming are summarized. Areas nominated for support in the progra m include 15 additional priority coal regions in 14 states, which comprise 95 percent of the current reserve estimates and most of the coal-bearing areas of low sulfur potential.

Lynda T. Carlson
Dwight K. French
John L. Preston

Federal agencies with survey responsibilities often face competing demands. On the one hand, data users frequently require additional information or more detailed information in order to address current issues. On the other hand, data providers, citing in creased respondent burden and, possibly, a lack of specific data, often resist changes to existing survey forms. This article describes how the EIA simplified the development of an expanded version of the Manufacturing Energy Consumption Survey (MECS) thr ough the use of focus groups. These focus groups defined user needs and examined the feasibility of collecting these data.

Stanley R. Freedman

EIA has evolved a unique approach to improving information quality in a decentralized statistical agency. The idea is to give the program offices full line responsibility for the quality of their products, but to rely on a quality assurance group to overs ee their efforts. The quality assurance group assures that these efforts are effective through a systematic process of data and model evaluation, applied research to address technical problems, and administrative procedures and standards to promote improv ed practice. Together the program offices and the quality assurance group keep the agency's leadership fully apprised of quality concerns and actively involved in solving quality problems. After reviewing the overall approach, this article describes the k inds of evaluations that are done and the mix of administrative procedures and standards used to accomplish changes. The article concludes with a discussion of the kinds of problems that are amenable to this approach.

Douglas R. Hale
Larry R. Spancake

This article describes the Energy Information Administration's work to assess the potential of experimental economics for policy analysis. The article reviews the experimental approach and describes an application to provisions of the Clean Air Act Amendm ents of 1990.

Michael J. Griffey
Jacob Bournazian

With the creation of new survey forms and publications containing four-dimensional data, the Petroleum Marketing Division within the Energy Information Administration was faced with a difficult task to insure confidentiality of respondent data. PMD's solution applies a linear-programming technique to identify initially which cells discl ose individual respondent-level data and reviews the suppression pattern by an automated program that is table independent and unrestricted by table size to add complementary suppression. The solution allows changes in the suppression formula and level of suppression, as well as additions and deletions from the publication without significant changes to the software.

J. Alan Beamon has been an electric power analyst with the Energy Information Administration (EIA) since 1984. Since coming to EIA from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he has contributed to a wide variety of analyses, including the Annual Energy Outlook, the Annual Outlook for U.S. Electric Power, and the National Energy Strategy. Other areas of interest include nonutility power production and utility demand-side management programs.

Richard Bonskowski is a geologist in the Energy Assessment Branch at the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Bonskowski has been with EIA since 1980. He has maintained and carried out updates and revisions of the demonstrated reserve base of coal since 1982. He has provided guidance in coal geology, coal quality, and mining industry topics applied to the mine-level EIA annual Coal Production report, and has contributed summaries of coal industry developments for the EIA Quarterly Coal Report. Bonskowski analyzed production and transportation data to provide computation variables over a 7-year period for the Weekly Coal Production report. Prior to joining EIA, he developed environmental impact assessment for industrial projects, including new coal mines and regional impacts of coal mining activities, and for coastal zone development projects. Other experience includes bathometric and oceanographic surveys, flood plain mapping and hydrologic studies, and pollution studies. Bonskowski received a B.S. in geology in 1966 from St. Louis University.

Jacob Bournazian is an economist with the Petroleum Marketing Division of the Energy information Administration (EIA). He received a B.A. from George Washington University in 1979, an M.A. from the University of Delaware in 1981, and a J.D. from George Washington University in 1985.

Lynda T. Carlson is the Director of the Energy End Use and Integrated Statistics I Division, Office of Energy Markets and End Use, Energy Information Administration. She is responsible for the overall direction of end-use surveys of energy consumption in the residential, residential transportation, commercial buildings, and manufacturing sectors, and for the integrated historical publications of EIA. She received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois in 1974.

Barbara T. Fichman received a B.A. degree in philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 1976. She later attended the Foundation for the Advancement of Education in the Sciences at the National Institutes of Health, where she studied biochemistry. In 1988, she completed the Publications Specialist Program at The George Washington University.

Stanley R. Freedman is currently a team leader in the Quality Assurance Division, Office of Statistical Standards, Energy Information Administration (EIA), a position he has held for 10 years. Prior to coming to EIA, Dr. Freedman was a statistician with the U.S. Bureau of the Census and the Florida Department of Community Affairs. He received his Bachelor's degree from Temple University, and his Master's degree and Doctorate from Florida State University.

Dwight K. French is the Chief of the Transportation and Industrial Branch of the Energy End-Use Division. He is responsible for developing and implementing systems for providing baseline statistical data for the industrial and nonresidential sectors of the U.S. economy. He is also the senior mathematical statistician for the Division. French received an M.S. in mathematics with emphasis on statistics, from the Ohio State University in 1972.

Michael J. Griffey is a Supervisory Mathematical Statistician in the Petroleum Marketing Division, EIA. He received a B.S. from Bucknell University in 1965 and an M.S. from American University in 1972.

Douglas R. Hale is the Director of the Quality Assurance Division of the Energy Information Administration, a position he has held since 1981. Prior to that he was a senior economist in the Environmental Protection Agency and an operations research analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His primary interests are the evaluation of economic analysis methods and the application of economics and statistics to public policy questions. His Ph.D. is in mathematical economics from the University of Kansas.

Calvin A. Kent was Administrator of the Energy Information Administration in the U.S. Department of Energy from August 1990 to January 1993. He was appointed by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate in the summer of 1990. He previously was at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, where he held the Herman Lay Chair in Private Enterprise and directed the Center for Private Enterprise and the National Center for Entrepreneurship Education.
He has widespread experience in the area of energy and utility regulation. Before moving to Texas, he was president of the Vermillion, South Dakota, City Council which operated its own municipal electric distribution system. He was vice chairman of the South Dakota Public Power Association during the period when it participated in the construction of coal-fired electric generators in Wyoming. As part of his duties as chief economist for the South Dakota legislature, he researched and prepared the legislation establishing the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission and assisted in training its original staff.
Since his move to Texas, Dr. Kent was elected mayor of Woodway, Texas, which has concurrent Jurisdiction over the regulation of electric utilities and original jurisdiction over gas utilities. At Baylor University, he taught courses which covered energy and utility regulation. He has conducted seminars in energy economics for mid- and upper-level managers for over 100 different utilities.
Dr. Kent has received worldwide recognition for his leadership in economics and entrepreneurship education. He received his B.A. from Baylor and his advanced degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia, with postdoctorate work at Virginia, Chicago, Wichita State, and Rice Universities. He has received numerous awards for outstanding teaching, including being designated as one of 10 outstanding teachers in Texas. He is listed in Who's Who and has written or edited 17 books and over 100 articles.

Michael J. Linders has been an analyst at the Energy Information Administration (EIA) since 1988. He has contributed to a wide variety of analyses, including the Annual Energy Outlook and the Annual Outlook for U.S. Electric Power.

John L. Preston is the Team Leader for the Manufacturing Energy Consumption Survey and is responsible for its day-to-day implementation. He also serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor at The George Washington University. Mr. Preston received an M.A. in applied statistics from the University of Maryland in 1975.

C. William Skinner is Technical Assistant to the Administrator, EIA. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas and has extensive experience in the design and development of large-scale modeling systems. Dr. Skinner led the initial requirements analysis for the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS) and headed the NEMS Project Office, which performed the analysis and design work leading to the current NEMS development.

Larry R. Spancake has been an economist specializing in electric power at the Energy Information Administration since 1987. Prior to that, he was an economist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and a municipal bond analyst at Moody's Investors Service. His research interest is the economics of electric power, focusing on production. He has an M.Ph. in economics from Yale University.

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