`pybctc` Introduction
==========================

*pybctc* is a python package that makes access to the British
Columbia[, Canada,] Transmission Corporation (BCTC) electric data
easier.

The British Columbia Transmission Corporation <http://www.bctc.com> is
a crown corporation with a mandate to plan, build, and operate the
province of British Columbia's electricity transmission system.  It
publishes valuable information on electicity generation, transmission,
and consumption to its website.  This information is useful for many
purposes including economic analysis, power trading, electric system
study, and forecasting.  The first step in using such information is to
download it an parse it into useful data structures - a task performed
by this library.  The processed data normally will feed statistical
methods, heuristics, and system models to provide a useful analysis of
the British Columbia electric system.

The *pybctc* project is hosted at <http://bitbucket.org/kc/pybctc> and
releases are made via the Python Package Index at
<http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pybctc>.  Online documentation is available
at <http://packages.python.org/pybctc>.


Reports
-------

Several reports are accessible through *pybctc*:

* Intertie Flows <http://www.bctc.com/transmission_system/actual_flow_data/historical_data.htm>
* Control Area Load <http://www.bctc.com/transmission_system/balancing_authority_load_data/historical_transmission_data.htm>

Time
----

*pybctc* expends considerable effort to accurately report all times in
UTC.  There are two main benefits of this usage:

1. Easy time arithmetic because there are no daylight-savings-time
   (DST) transitions.
2. Ease of comparing data from different system operators.

Times are best kept in UTC until they are displayed to the user::

   >>> from datetime import datetime
   >>> import pytz
   >>>
   >>> utc_dt = pytz.utc.localize(datetime(2007, 1, 1))
   >>> print utc_dt.astimezone(bctc.BC_TZ)

For more information see pytz documentation at <http://pytz.sourceforge.net> (2010-02-23).