Electicity Generation from Coal-Fired Power Plants

Hi Nick. Sector 31, Electric Power Generation, Transmission, and Distribution includes all types of energy and electricity generation, not just from coal. There is no easy way to isolate employment at coal-fired plants in the IMPLAN Model. If you have local data on employment at these facilities in your study region, you could use the percentage share of employment at these facilities and apply it to Sector’s 31 total employment to obtain an estimate of this data. You would then replace Sector 31’s employment with your estimate of employment associated with coal-fired plants in your region. Another approach is to locate data on energy production by source and amounts in your state. Using this data, you could compute the share of energy/electricity produced by coal-fired plants and use this figure to parse out employment from Sector 31’s total employment in your region. Again, you would replace Sector 31’s employment with your estimate of employment associated with coal-fired plants using this approach. If you decide to model the impact of coal-fired plants’ employment in your region, we would recommend that make the following adjustments in your model before simulating any impacts. 1) Check the model’s RPC for coal in your region to make sure that it is not too high or too low. The idea here is that not all of the coal used in these power plants may not have originated your study region. Adjusting the RPC for coal, Sector 21, allows you to better reflect the use of this input in your region. To adjust the RPC, you would navigate to Customize > Trade flows > Industry/Institution RPC tab, select Commodity 3021 from the drop-down menu and change Sector 31's RPC to match what you think it ought to be. 2) Since Sector 31 includes electricity generation from than coal, you should zero-out the Coefficient for Commodity 3020 (Oil and natural gas) and add it to Commodity 3021's Coefficient via Customize > Industry Production > Sector 31. This will give you a better approximation of a sector that reflect primarily coal-fired electric production in your region. From there, you would make your policy changes adjustments that you want to model in this industry. We hope this helps. Please let us know if we can provide additional assistance.