[patrickbrown4]

Merge order

This PR builds on #249 (which was required to fix some supply curve issues) so it should wait to be reviewed & merged until after that PR is merged.

Summary

This PR adds two new zone sets:

• WIcounty: Counties for Wisconsin, z90 zones for the rest of the country (following up on Setting up bespoke ReEDS zones #242)
• z2972: Minimally aggregated counties as described in 20251125 - low-data counties.pptx
  • Counties with no load participation factor (LPF), or no high-voltage transmission links to other counties, are merged with the neighboring county with which they share the longest border

Technical details

Implementation notes

• I used the agg_empty_counties.py script in the TSC repo (internal) to identify low-data counties and their neighbors

Additional changes

• As noted above, I needed the changes in Fix Monte Carlo random sampling for VRE siting availability #249 for the new zones to work; once that PR is merged and this one is caught up, those changes will be dropped from the diff

Switches added/removed/changed

• GSw_ZoneSet: Added zWIcounty and z2972 options

Issues resolved

#242

Relevant sources or documentation

20251125 - low-data counties.pptx

Here are the new maps:

Validation, testing, and comparison report(s)

Here are a few comparisons between z3109 (single counties) and z2972 (minimally aggregated counties):

• results-ERCOT_z3109,ERCOT_z2972.pptx
• results-WECC_z3109,WECC_z2972.pptx
• results-WY_z3109,WY_z2972.pptx

I only used a single ReEDS/PRAS iteration to save time, but NEUE levels are lower with z2972. That was the motivation for this zone set, and makes sense since artificially islanded zones (which cause RA problems) are aggregated into their neighbors.

Checklist for author

Details to double-check

• Charge code provided to reviewers
• Included comparison reports for appropriate test cases
• Documentation updated if necessary
• If input data added/modified:
  • Preprocessing steps have been documented and committed to ReEDS_Input_Processing

General information to guide review

• Zero impact on results of default case
• No large data file(s) added/modified
• No substantive impact on runtime for full-US reference case
• No substantive impact on folder size for full-US reference case
• No change to process flow (runreeds.py, reeds/core/solve/solve.py)
• No change to code organization
• No change to package requirements (environment.yml or Project.toml)

Did you use LLM tools (chatbot or copilot) in the preparation of this PR? If so, describe how

No