Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety reviews revised draft data guidelines v4, sets Jan. 1, 2025 effective date

Jenny Reed, supervisor of the data analytics unit at the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, opened a hybrid public workshop to present the agency’s revised draft Data Guidelines version 4 and to solicit public comments. "This workshop is for convenience, for information sharing. It's not an exhaustive review of all of the changes in the published revised draft data guidelines version 4," Reed said.

The revised draft aligns the department’s reporting schema with the Wind Management Plan (WMP) technical guidance appendix A, Reed said, and implements related changes across both the GIS (spatial) and tabular templates. The agency published a redline and two change logs (a geodatabase template change log and a template workbooks change log) to document edits and help users locate less-visible template changes.

Why this matters: The changes are intended to clarify the relationship between categories, initiatives and activities used in WMPs, reduce ambiguous field names in spreadsheets, and improve consistency between the WMP technical guidance and the department’s data collection templates. Reed said the department has tried to limit substantive changes but proceeded with the edits because they standardize terminology and reporting across documents.

Key changes explained

- Alignment with WMP appendix A: The department says it updated Appendix C of the guidelines to implement the WMP hierarchy (category → initiative → activity). In the templates this appears as renamed fields and clarified definitions so reported items roll up correctly. Reed said reporting has historically occurred at the activity level and the edits were intended to make labels cleaner and consistent with the WMP guidance.

- Rename and…