The Gujarat Power Dashboard
The Gujarat Power Dashboard is a visual representation of regulatory data among all power sector stakeholders in Gujarat. The data is gathered from publicly available regulatory filings. Stakeholders include the publicly owned generation company, Gujarat State Electricity Corporation Limited (GSECL), and the four publicly owned distribution companies - Dakshin, Madhya, Paschim & Uttar Gujarat Vij Company Limited (D/M/P/UGVCL).
This comprehensive dashboard, which covers over 10,000 data points, is aimed at researchers, regulators and policy-makers to understand the intricate details of the power sector in Gujarat. The dashboard currently has data from 2010-2021, making it a useful tool for time-series analysis.
The dashboard can be used to understand questions such as:
- How have fixed utility costs gone up over time?
- How have fuel costs increased over time?
- Has an increase in consumer tariffs kept pace with increasing costs?
- What is the retail consumer mix of the distribution utilities?
- Have plant load factors of thermal assets met the normative values?
- How has generation capacity changed over time?
We hope that through this dashboard, we can bring about transparency in power sector regulatory data, which ultimately would aid sound decision making.
Methodology
Abstracting data from the regulatory orders is a challenging task, given the sheer volume of the data. The challenge is further compounded by the fact that the data formats change over time. Any manual data extraction would be time consuming and a laborious affair.
We have therefore developed scripts that can perform the dual tasks of extraction and organisation in the format necessary. This semi-automated approach greatly accelerates the entire process. It also makes it scalable, if such a dashboard needs to be prepared for another state.
Finally, we hope to build analytical tools that can help project these data points into future to build interesting "What-if" scenarios in future. Stay tuned!