December 6, 2005: The Federal Reserve will discontinue its survey of industrial electric power use with the publication on December 15, 2005, of data for October 2005. The response rate for the voluntary survey had dropped significantly since the early 1990s, with coverage in 2004 nearly 40 percent less than at its peak in 1993. With the publication of the annual revision to the G.17 on November 7, 2005, the monthly indicators for the industrial production indexes for the twenty industries that previously relied on electric power use were changed to production-worker hours for the period 1997 to the present. Although the indexes of electric power use will no longer be updated, the historical indexes will remain available from the historical data page for the G.17. A notice seeking comments on this action was originally published in the Federal Register on September 29, 2005; no comments were received during the public comment period, which ended on November 28, 2005.
