Author: Christina Gosnell

Categories
updates

2025 PUDL Annual Report

Read the 2025 PUDL Annual Report to learn about PUDL developments as well as PUDL Sustainer plans for 2026.

2025 was the first year of the PUDL Sustainers Program. We designed the program to ensure the ongoing impact and reliability of PUDL:  data and software are kept up to date, bugs are fixed, and everything gets tested and released on a regular schedule. At the same time,  we sought to foster closer relationships with the organizations that rely heavily on PUDL data for their work, giving them an opportunity to see under the hood and weigh in on important decisions.

Thanks to support from our inaugural sustainers, RMI and GridLab, we were able to launch the program and keep PUDL  up and running!

24,000 unique IPs 
Accessing PUDL data from cloud storage buckets		577 users 
Registered for the PUDL Data Viewer		70+ schools 
Accessing PUDL data
20 archives
Of new data added to Zenodo		14 citations 
In academic journals, pre-prints, and theses (including Applied Energy, The Electricity Journal, and Environmental Research: Energy)		14 new tables 
Including imputed FERC 714 and EIA 930 data, SEC 10-K outputs tracking parent-subsidiary company relationships, and AEO projected energy use data
10 conferences
Attendance and presentation at USAEE, INFORMS, EPRI, TWEEDS and others!		8 terabytes
Of PUDL data distributed through S3 and Zenodo		4 interviews 
In the MIT Technology Review, the New York Times, Salon and Les Echos 
PUDL Annual Report – 2025Download
Categories
analysis

Boiler Generator Associations from EIA 923 and 860

In working to calculate the marginal cost of electricity of all of the generating units across the country, we first had to calculate the heat rate (MMBtu per MWhr) for each generating unit. The heat rate allows us to attribute the fuel costs, reported at the plant level, to the electric generation, reported at the generating unit level. The heat rate is derived from fuel consumption (MMBtu), reported at the boiler level, and electricity generation (MWh), reported at the generating unit level. To understand the heat rate, one must link up all the boilers with the generators in a given generating unit. Our work to this end uncovered a hole in EIA’s 860 reported boiler generator associations. We filled this hole through a series of matching cartwheels and network analysis.

We’ve recently reconfigured our database ingest process to move the new and improved boiler generator associations into its own table in PUDL. You can also read through this process as a Github Gist.

Continue reading “Boiler Generator Associations from EIA 923 and 860”