Introductory Sessions:
Opening Remarks:
Guy Caruso, EIA Administrator to include:
1.
Update on the External
Review Team
2.
New EIA Homepages
3.
EIA-914 Data
4.
Hurricane Katrina
Updates since
the Last Meeting:
5.
Since the Spring
Meeting, Nancy Kirkendall, Director, SMG
6.
Results of the
Simulation Study for the EIA-914,
7.
Update: EIA’s Regional Short-Term Energy Outlook, Margot
Anderson, Director, EMEU
Session Topics:
1.
Short-Term Forecasting Performance Measures: Accuracy
Evaluation, Margot Anderson, Director,
EMEU
This
plenary session will: (1) present and
discuss diagnostic tools for gauging forecast accuracy; (2) provide an initial
assessment of forecast errors for key variables in the STEO system; and (3)
discuss how the errors can be used to improve model performance.
Suggested
discussants: Jae Edmonds and Moshe Feder
2.
Vehicle Energy Use: What We Did and What It Tells Us, Mark Schipper, Energy Markets and End Use (EMEU)
The
National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) is the nation’s inventory of local and
long distance travel. Between April 2001 and May 2002, roughly 26 thousand
households[1]
were interviewed by the U.S. Department of Transportation about their travel,
based on the use of over 53 thousand vehicles. Using confidential data
collected during those interviews, coupled with EIA’s retail fuel prices,
external data sources of test[2]
fuel economy, and internal procedures for modifying test fuel economy to
on-road, in-use fuel economy, EIA has extended this inventory to include the
energy used for travel, thereby continuing a data series that was discontinued
by EIA in 1994.
This
paper presents the methods used for each eligible sampled vehicle to (1)
provide three fundamental inputs crucial to developing annual household
vehicles energy consumption and expenditures information: composite fuel
economy, retail fuel price, and in-possession vehicle-miles traveled; (2)
adjust imputed composite fuel economy to calculate an on-road fuel economy; (3)
adjust on-road fuel economy to calculate an in-use fuel economy based on actual
household driving characteristics; and, (4) derive annual energy consumption
and motor fuel expenditures information from these adjusted inputs.
Such methods allow EIA to calculate estimates of the
amount of and expenditures for energy consumed by the nation’s vehicles
operated for residential transportation. These estimates also include number
and types of vehicles per household, and for each vehicle: annual miles
traveled, gallons of fuel consumed, type of fuel used, price paid for fuel, and
fuel economy (gasoline mileage).
Suggested Report-out:
Susan Sereika
3.
Preserving EIA Trustworthy Datasets, Model
Documentation and Contextual History,
John Paul Deley,
The
purpose of this session is to present an overview of EIA’s recordkeeping
practices and solicit advice and recommendations on issues surrounding the
life-cycle management of EIA statistical datasets including documentation for:
survey planning and design; components of modeling systems; standards and
procedures for processing and editing; retention of information products and
the applications and software used to collect, analyze, access, use and
maintain EIA’s e-assets. EIA will
introduce the committee to plans for incorporating records management
transparency into the agency’s routine business processes and seek advice on
its current records initiatives and plans for increased efficiency in the
management of its records.
The session will include an overview of federal record
keeping requirements; an overview of EIA current records management practices;
and an overview of 2005 records management initiatives. It will also cover ongoing efforts to create
retention and disposition schedules for electronic system program components;
the efforts of the new EIA History Committee and initial deliberations on a
possible EIA Content Management System (document / data repository).
The committee will be asked to address the following
questions:
·
What
methodologies and best practices should be put into place to insure the
“trustworthiness” (authenticity) of EIA recordkeeping systems?
·
Which web
accessible finding aids (including a Master Publications Index) might improve
EIA customer access to permanent (pre-web) products (e.g. this committee’s
historical materials)?
·
How should
modeling system documentation be preserved?
By whom and for how long?
Suggested Report-out: Walter
Hill
4. Learning from the Past: Updating Data Quality
Efforts, Renee Miller, SMG, EIA.
Many
years ago EIA presented data comparisons, documenting why data series that
purport to measure similar concepts differ, to the public as part of detailed
reports assessing data quality. An
example is EIA data on motor gasoline sales, EIA data on product supplied of
motor gasoline, and
We
are now working on ideas for this new product and welcome suggestions from the
Committee. This paper presents background on how data quality assessments were
previously performed and discusses what did and did not work well. It also presents an example of what we are
thinking about for the future. Past
activities may serve as an impetus for other ideas for Web products and are
related to the paper on survey self-assessments.
Suggested
Discussants: Mark Bernstein and Randy Sitter
5.
Can Discrepant Estimates Be a Good Thing?, previously, Measuring the Economy May Not Be as Simple as 1, 2, 3, Renee Miller, SMG, EIA
In
August the Washington Post ran an article with this title showing “conflicting”
data on the poverty rate using the official government measure and a measure
based on the National Academy of Sciences recommendation. The Census Bureau was cited as the source for
both data series. However, they are not
the only agencies with conflicting or potentially conflicting data. In the presentation, “Learning from the Past:
Updating Data Quality Efforts,” we show various estimates that could be
surrogates for motor gasoline demand. In
addition, EIA has shown estimates of sales of fuel oil and kerosene benchmarked
to product supplied and estimates that are not benchmarked, carefully labeled
as different series. For monthly natural
gas production, we are showing data from our new survey that we consider to be
experimental as well as our official data series. So we think we are adequately explaining what
we are doing, but are we? We would like
to have a discussion with the committee on what they think of these practices,
how we can make things less confusing for data users and avoid headlines about
conflicting data. This will be an open
discussion and we would like to hear from each of the Committee members.
Committee
Discussion. No discussants.
6.
Survey Self Assessments, Tom Broene, SMG
This
session will briefly review self-assessments conducted by government offices in
Suggested
Discussants: Johnny Blair and Barbara Forsyth
7. Data Errors,
Structural Change and Time Series Shocks in the Electricity Market,
This
paper uses publicly available electricity generation micro level data and
current imputation methods to test if microeconomic theoretical concepts can be
used to: improve the accuracy of currently used survey sampling and imputation
methods and the time series processes these survey aggregates represent. In
addition to this, resulting imputation models are compared across sample years
to characterize structural change in the electric industry.
Suggested
Discussants: Mark Burton and Nagaraj
Neerchal
8.
Frames Comparisons of the EIA-3 and EIA-860 with the
Manufacturing Sector of the 2002 Economic Census and the 2002 Manufacturing
Energy Consumption Survey, Vicki Haitot and Richard Hough, U.S. Census
Bureau, and Shawna Waugh, SMG, EIA
9.
The Energy
Information Administration contracted with the U.S. Census Bureau to conduct
five frame evaluations for CNEAF surveys. This analysis was intended to
evaluate whether or not EIA has sufficient coverage of manufacturing
establishments within each survey frame. The Census Bureau has completed these
evaluations and presented the results for the EIA-5 (Quarterly Coal Consumption
and Quality Report, Coke Plants), EIA-63a (Annual Solar Thermal Collector
Manufacturing Survey) and the EIA-63b (Annual Photovoltaic Module and Cell
Manufacturing Survey) during the April 2005 meeting of the ASA Committee on
Energy Statistics. The paper contains
the results documentation for all five evaluations, and the presentation will
focus on the results of the evaluations for the EIA-3 (Quarterly Coal
Consumption and Quality Report, Manufacturing Plants) and the EIA-860 (Annual
Electric Generator Report” for Combined Heat and Power Plants).
Suggested Report-out: Darius Singpurwalla
9. The
Relationships Between Various Price Series: Are Futures Contracts Prices Good
Predictors of Future Spot Prices? Bill Trapmann and
This session will begin
with a brief presentation of a recent paper dealing with natural gas prices,
which will be used as the basis for further discussion. The primary objective of the subsequent
discussion is not to critique the earlier work.
Instead the objective is to develop guidelines or suggestions for
extending this work or developing other approaches to cover other fuel prices
Suggested Report-Out:
Cutler
[1] The NHTS
collected travel data from the civilian, non-institutionalized population of
the
[2] Federal
law requires automobile manufacturers to determine the fuel economy of new
vehicles offered for sale in the