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).