Wikidata:Property proposal/National Grid Balancing Mechanism Unit ID

National Grid Balancing Mechanism Unit ID

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Generic

   Done: National Grid Balancing Mechanism unit ID (P11610) (Talk and documentation)

Description	Unit identifier for the UK National Grid electricity Balancing Mechanism
Data type	External identifier
Allowed values	[A-Z0-9\-]{4,12}
Example 1	Peterhead Power Station (Q7178058)National Grid Balancing Mechanism Unit IDPEHE-1
Example 2	Peterhead Power Station (Q7178058)National Grid Balancing Mechanism Unit IDPEHE-2
Example 3	Cruachan Power Station (Q15212096)National Grid Balancing Mechanism Unit IDCRUA-1
Example 4	Cruachan Power Station (Q15212096)National Grid Balancing Mechanism Unit IDCRUA-2
Example 5	Cruachan Power Station (Q15212096)National Grid Balancing Mechanism Unit IDCRUA-3
Example 6	Cruachan Power Station (Q15212096)National Grid Balancing Mechanism Unit IDCRUA-4
Source	API list
Planned use	IDs added for all major UK power plants in the next month or so
Number of IDs in source	1852
Expected completeness	eventually complete (Q21873974)
Implied notability	Wikidata property for an identifier that does not imply notability (Q62589320)
Robot and gadget jobs	Possibly scope for some mechanical import, but primarily manual
Applicable "stated in"-value	Elexon Insights Solution (Q115949512)
Distinct-values constraint	yes
Wikidata project	WikiProject Energy (Q15106301)

Motivation

The Balancing Mechanism (BM) is the process by which electricity supply and demand are balanced on the National Grid in Great Britain. Each party which produces or consumes electricity at a wholesale level has one or more BM Unit IDs. Power plants will generally have a number of BM Unit IDs - commonly one per generator in the case of hydro or thermal plants.

Open data is available which shows (among other things) projected and historic generation by BM Unit ID, but there is limited data available to link these IDs to power plants. I think Wikidata would be a very good place for that to live.

A full list of these unit IDs can be found in the API. Note that there are two identifiers (the National Grid identifier and the Elexon identifier) which seem fairly interchangeable, but the Elexon identifier is missing for some of these. For that reason I've chosen the National Grid identifier - the mapping between these two identifiers is 1:1. To avoid confusion between the two identifiers, the proposed regex forbids underscores, and the Elexon identifier always contains an underscore.

My initial interest here is power plants, but energy suppliers and traders also have balancing mechanism IDs and I may look to link these in future. I've not added them to the domain at present as I'd like to put some more thought into allowed entities there.

- Russss (talk) 14:56, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

•  Support --Dhx1 (talk) 03:40, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
• Unclear why this cannot be handled better by creating ~1800 items, one for each ID, and associating them with their power stations. Why is a property necessary or desirable, not least when per the above blurb, the ID does not uniquely identify an extant WD item (e.g. a power station) so much as identify a component of an item. --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:51, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Isn't this mostly a question of whether there's a single-value constraint on this property? Surely a property will still be required to hold the ID even if there's a unique wikidata item per BM unit? I'm not averse to creating one item per BM unit (they could correspond to a generator, or a substation in a large wind farm, or a geographic subset of an energy company's customers) but there will be some which will be hard to identify with a physical object. --Russss (talk) 17:55, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

@Russss, Dhx1: Done National Grid Balancing Mechanism unit ID (P11610) Midleading (talk) 09:36, 20 February 2023 (UTC)