abpower

abpower is a parser for the publicly-available data provided by AESO related to the power grid in Alberta. It consists of a package and a command-line utility.

Background

During the summer of 2020 (yes, that summer) I built a website named the Alberta Power Dashboard that gathered and displayed data from AESO. It was fairly buggy and eventually I stopped maintaining it.

This is an attempt to write a more robust parser than the original, with the possibility of bringing the website back at some point in the future - or at least providing a parser someone else can use.

Installation

With pip:-

pip install abpower

With poetry:-

poetry add abpower

Usage

The abpower package

You can query for all data currently supported by the module (see below) with the following:-

from abpower import ETSParser

parser = ETSParser()
data = parser.get()

This will return an ETS object that contains the data. The as_dict and as_json properties will return dict and JSON string representations of the data respectively.

Querying specific data

You can pass a list or tuple of strings to the parser to only get and parse specific sections of the AESO data.

For example, to only query for the Current Supply Demand and System Marginal Price data:-

from abpower import ETSParser

parser = ETSParser()
data = parser.get(query=["current-supply-demand", "system-marginal-price"])

You can also import the specific parser directly:-

from abpower.parser import CurrentSupplyDemandParser, SystemMarginalPriceParser

csd_parser = CurrentSupplyDemandParser()
csd_data = csd_parser.get()

smp_parser = SystemMarginalPriceParser()
smp_data = smp_parser.get()

The abpower command-line utility

A command-line utility - also named abpower - will be installed along with the module.

As with the module, you can query for all data with:-

abpower get

This will query, parse and return all data in JSON format. You can use the --write-to-file (or -w) option to write the data to a file instead of standard output.

Querying specific data

Also like the module, you can query for specific data only:-

abpower get -q current-supply-demand -q system-marginal-price

Available data

Not all the data provided on the AESO website is queried or parsed by abpower. This may change in the future, but right now the following are supported:-

• current-supply-demand - the Current Supply Demand report, which gives an overview of the grid
• actual-forecast - the Actual / Forecast report, which gives a historical comparison of the forecasted and actual usage of the grid over the last 24 hours
• daily-average-pool-price - the Daily Average Pool Price report, which gives averages of the pool price over the last week
• hourly-available-capability - the 7 Day Hourly Available Capability report, which gives a forecast of hourly availability over the next 7 days
• pool-price - the Pool Price report, which gives the historical pool prices over the last 24 hours
• supply-surplus - the Supply Surplus report, which gives the forecasted surplus status for the next 6 hours
• system-marginal-price - the System Marginal Price report, which gives the historical price over the last few hours
• peak-load-forecast the Peak Load Forecast report, which gives the forecasted peak load for the next 7 days

Known issues and future plans

There are no known issues, but this was initially written in a weekend so make of that what you will.

• Documentation needs writing and/or generating
• Tests need writing
• Coverage of the data available needs expanding

Credits and contributing

abpower is written and maintained by Andy Smith. Pull requests and bug reports are welcome!

License

abpower is distributed under the MIT License.