IAMconsortium
Does (or should) `Final Energy|Commercial` include public services
Under Final Energy, there is a Commercial subhierarchy, which contains several sectors that are commonly provided by both private commercial actors and public/municipal actors, like Water, and Heat. The closest matching final energy sector in the IEA energy balances is called "Commercial and public services", not just "Commercial services". Does Final Energy|Commercial also include public and municipal actors? Or just commercial ones?
If public actors are included, should the hierarchy instead be called Final Energy|Commercial and Public Services or just Final Energy|Commercial and Public? And then possibly with subsectors Final Energy|Commercial and Public|Commercial and "Final Energy|Commercial and Public|Public` for models that distinguish between commercial and public suppliers of these services?
Just to be clear, this isn't purely hypothetical. In the IAM COMPACT project, we have models that need to represent energy use for municipal water supply, and distinguish between private and public actors. We probably need to add variables in the project repo to make that distinction, but it would at least be good to know what the current hierarchy in common-definitions includes.
I assume anyone from @IAMconsortium/common-definitions-energy can answer this.
Would be good if it is clarified in the descriptions. And I assume adding additional subsector variables should be possible.
To not upend people's post-processing scripts, I'd suggest going with something like:
- Final Energy|Commercial|Public
- Final Energy|Commercial|Private
and clarify in the description & notes of the variable template
Thanks for raising an interesting topic. I don't know what IAMs are doing these days (I haven't done the conversion between IEA energy balances and model datasets for a while), but distinguishing between public and private is difficult. Policy of privitization can switch the character of various actors from public to private. And there are private and public hospitals, private and public universities, etc. So we can just clarify the defintion so that it includes public services?
I'd be surprised if any models could produce this public/private distinction, for any regions. The IEA energy balances have a "Commercial and public services" category, with no disaggregation between the two, and even within the USA where the EIA produces dozens of highly granular datasets characterizing energy use, there are none that I'm aware of that disaggregate public vs. private. Even at the facility level this disaggregation would often be difficult. Perhaps there is just a definitional issue, that we need to be clear that "Commercial" (perhaps renamed) includes public services.
Thanks for the comments. Given the comments, it sounds like keeping the current naming and just clarifying the definitions by specifying in the description attribute that the sectors in question include both private and public services. On our side, we could then use a project-specific repo to add a few subvariables where we add |Public or |Municipal and |Private to the sectors where we need it.
I agree that most models probably don't and can't make any systematic distinction between public and private/commercial services. In our case, it's also just a few specific services, mainly water supply and treatment.
Jumping on this I raised a similar topic on the disagregation of this Comemrcial sector: https://github.com/IAMconsortium/common-definitions/issues/298
