List of utility company aliases

The various ways of looking up utility companies/rates are great, but what about utility company aliases? The OpenEI "Browse rates by utility name" includes aliases–is there some way to access this list?

Edit:

Thanks Ryan, this looks like it's going to be a great system.

In case others are wondering, the query that Ryan wrote for "Category:Utility_Company_Aliases" was supposed to be "OpenBracket OpenBracket Category:Utility_Company_Aliases CloseBracket CloseBracket"--the brackets converted it into a link. See example here: http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Selecting_pages

Strangely, my query for "Category:Utility_Company_Aliases" returns no results, maybe because they are all redirect pages?

I think I'm starting to get the hang of this. This is the query that I ended up with: "http://en.openei.org/wiki/Special:Ask?title=Special%3AAsk&q=Category%3AEIA_Utility_Companies_and_Aliases&po=%3FName%0D%0A%3FEiaUtilityId%0D%0A&sort_num=&order_num=ASC&eq=yes&p[format]=broadtable&p[limit]=50"

Edit 2:

Actually I just realized that that query doesn't return any of the aliases (e.g. "Xcel Energy of Colorado"), so that query isn't working for what I want to do.

Submitted by Ewilson on 22 June, 2012 - 10:05

3 answers

Points: 1

Hey Ewilson, great question. Check out http://en.openei.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategories&from=Ut, which has a list of categories: Utility Companies, Utility Company Aliases and http://en.openei.org/wiki/Category:EIA_Utility_Companies_and_Aliases are all relevant categories here. Utility company aliases are mediawiki redirects to the actual utility company. Thus, you can use an Ask Query such as http://en.openei.org/wiki/Special:Ask?title=Special%3AAsk&q=%5B%5BCategory%3AEIA_Utility_Companies_and_Aliases%5D%5D&po=&sort_num=&order_num=ASC&eq=yes&p%5Bformat%5D=broadtable&p%5Blimit%5D=20&p%5Bheaders%5D=&p%5Bmainlabel%5D=&p%5Blink%5D=&p%5Bintro%5D=&p%5Boutro%5D=&p%5Bdefault%5D=&eq=yes to query various fields from the aliases. Hope that helps - feel free to edit your question if that didn't answer everything! Rmckeel on 22 June, 2012 - 10:47

Points: 0

Ewilson - I think you can edit your question now, and I'm working on comments for answers so you don't have to add a new answer to comment :) #1 Not sure how to get redirect names, other than "scraping". There are mediawiki bots that could make scraping easier, perhaps someone else knows how to get those fields from an ask query or something. #2 To get more than 200 at a time, try a simple query "Category:Utility_Company_Aliases" at http://en.openei.org/wiki/Special:Ask - you can then see what you can add for "additional data to display" by clicking 'browse properties' on a page, such as "?EiaUtilityId" or other fields found on a page like this: http://en.openei.org/wiki/Special:Browse/3_Phases_Energy_Services Rmckeel on 22 June, 2012 - 13:53

Points: 0

Thanks Ryan. I couldn't figure out how to edit my question. It looks like using http://en.openei.org/wiki/Category:Utility_Company_Aliases will work. We'll have to scrape the redirect names from the 150 pages...not ideal but it will work just fine. By the way, on pages like http://en.openei.org/wiki/Category:EIA_Utility_Companies_and_Aliases , is there a way to view more than 200 items at a time? Ewilson on 22 June, 2012 - 12:22