The Public Utility Data Liberation Project (PUDL)

What is PUDL?

The PUDL Project (pronounced puddle) is an open source data processing pipeline that makes US energy data easier to access and use programmatically.

Hundreds of gigabytes of valuable data are published by US government agencies, but it's often difficult to work with. PUDL takes the original spreadsheets, CSV files, and databases and turns them into a unified resource. This allows users to spend more time on novel analysis and less time on data preparation.

The project is focused on serving researchers, activists, journalists, policy makers, and small businesses that might not otherwise be able to afford access to this data from commercial sources and who may not have the time or expertise to do all the data processing themselves from scratch.

We want to make this data accessible and easy to work with for as wide an audience as possible: anyone from a grassroots youth climate organizers working with Google sheets to university researchers with access to scalable cloud computing resources and everyone in between!

PUDL is comprised of three core components:

Raw Data Archives

PUDL archives all our raw inputs on Zenodo to ensure permanent, versioned access to the data. In the event that an agency changes how it publishes data or deletes old files, the data processing pipeline will still have access to the original inputs. Each of the data inputs may have several different versions archived, and all are assigned a unique DOI (digital object identifier) and made available through Zenodo's REST API. You can read more about the Raw Data Archives in the docs.

Data Pipeline

The data pipeline (this repo) ingests raw data from the archives, cleans and integrates it, and writes the resulting tables to SQLite and Apache Parquet files, with some accompanying metadata stored as JSON. Each release of the PUDL software contains a set of DOIs indicating which versions of the raw inputs it processes. This helps ensure that the outputs are replicable. You can read more about our ETL (extract, transform, load) process in the PUDL documentation.

Data Warehouse

The SQLite, Parquet, and JSON outputs from the data pipeline, sometimes called "PUDL outputs", are updated each night by an automated build process, and periodically archived so that users can access the data without having to install and run our data processing system. These outputs contain hundreds of tables and comprise a small file-based data warehouse that can be used for a variety of energy system analyses. Learn more about how to access the PUDL data.

What data is available?

PUDL currently integrates data from:

• EIA Form 860: - Source Docs - PUDL Docs
• EIA Form 860m: - Source Docs
• EIA Form 861: - Source Docs - PUDL Docs
• EIA Form 923: - Source Docs - PUDL Docs
• EIA Form 930: - Source Docs - PUDL Docs
• EIA Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) (a few tables): - Source Docs
• EPA Continuous Emissions Monitoring System (CEMS): - Source Docs - PUDL Docs
• FERC Form 1 (dozens of fully processed tables, plus raw data converted to SQLite): - Source Docs - PUDL Docs
• FERC Form 714 (a few fully processed tables): - Source Docs - PUDL Docs
• FERC Form 2 (raw data converted to SQLite): - Source Docs
• FERC Form 6 (raw data converted to SQLite): - Source Docs
• FERC Form 60 (raw data converted to SQLite): - Source Docs
• NREL Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) for Electricity: - Source Docs
• GridPath Resource Adequacy Toolkit (partial): - Source Docs - PUDL Docs
• US Census Demographic Profile 1 Geodatabase: - Source Docs

High Priority Target Datasets

If you're interested in any of these datasets, we'd love to integrate them into PUDL. Get in touch!

• Additional fully processed FERC Form 1 tables, e.g. Transmission & Distribution assets
• Additional high value EIA AEO tables
• PHMSA Natural Gas Annual Report
• EIA Form 176 (The Annual Report of Natural Gas Supply and Disposition)
• FERC Electric Quarterly Reports (EQR)
• EIA Thermoelectric Water Usage
• FERC Form 2 (Annual Report of Major Natural Gas Companies)
• MHSA Mines

How do I access the data?

For details on how to access PUDL data, see the data access documentation. A quick summary:

• Datasette provides browsable and queryable data from our nightly builds on the web: https://data.catalyst.coop
• Kaggle provides easy Jupyter notebook access to the PUDL data, updated weekly: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/catalystcooperative/pudl-project
• Zenodo provides stable long-term access to our versioned data releases with a citeable DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3653158
• Nightly Data Builds push their outputs to the AWS Open Data Registry: https://registry.opendata.aws/catalyst-cooperative-pudl/ See the nightly build docs for direct download links.
• The PUDL Development Environment lets you run the PUDL data processing pipeline locally.

Organizations using PUDL

This is a partial list of organizations that have used PUDL in their work. If your organization uses PUDL we'd love to list you here! Please open a pull request or email us at hello@catalyst.coop!

• RMI via both their Utility Transition Hub and Optimus financial modeling tool
• The PowerGenome Project out of Jesse Jenkins' ZERO Lab at Princeton University
• Energy Innovation
• Singularity Energy via the Open Grid Emissions Initiative
• The open source PyPSA-USA capacity expansion model.
• Win Climate
• The Deployment Gap Model Education Fund

Contributing to PUDL

Find PUDL useful? Want to help make it better? There are lots of ways to help!

• Check out our contribution guide including our Code of Conduct.
• You can file a bug report, make a feature request, or ask questions in the Github issue tracker.
• Feel free to fork the project and make a pull request with new code, better documentation, or example notebooks.
• Make a recurring financial contribution to support our work liberating public energy data.
• Hire us to do some custom analysis and allow us to integrate the resulting code into PUDL.

Licensing

In general, our code, data, and other work are permissively licensed for use by anybody, for any purpose, so long as you give us credit for the work we've done.

• The PUDL software is released under the MIT License.
• The PUDL data and documentation are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License v4.0 (CC-BY-4.0).

Contact Us

• For bug reports, feature requests, and other software or data issues please make a GitHub Issue.
• For more general support, questions, or other conversations around the project that might be of interest to others, check out the GitHub Discussions
• If you'd like to get occasional updates about the project sign up for our email list.
• Want to schedule a time to chat with us one-on-one about your PUDL use case, ideas for improvement, or get some personalized support? Join us for Office Hours
• Follow us here on GitHub
• Follow us on Mastodon: @CatalystCoop@mastodon.energy
• Follow us on BlueSky: @catalyst.coop
• Follow us on LinkedIn
• Follow us on HuggingFace
• Follow us on Twitter: @CatalystCoop
• Follow us on Kaggle
• More info on our website: https://catalyst.coop
• Email us if you'd like to hire us to provide customized data extraction and analysis: hello@catalyst.coop

About Catalyst Cooperative

Catalyst Cooperative is a small group of data wranglers and policy wonks organized as a worker-owned cooperative consultancy. Our goal is a more just, livable, and sustainable world. We integrate public data and perform custom analyses to inform public policy (Hire us!). Our focus is primarily on mitigating climate change and improving electric utility regulation in the United States.