It’s been eight years since we started the Public Utility Data Liberation Project (PUDL)! With support from funders like the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and organizations like RMI and GridLab, we’ve been able to provide cleaned, connected and open-access versions of essential public energy datasets to help close the gap on information asymmetry in the power sector.
We’re proud to publish data that’s used by a growing number of organizations and open-source projects working to decarbonize the US energy system, such as RMI, Princeton’s ZERO Lab, Singularity’s Open Grid Emissions and pyPSA-USA. We want to ensure that PUDL users working in the public interest continue to have free and open access to analysis-ready energy data.
But keeping PUDL free is…well…not free. As the project’s maintainers, we’re committed to ensuring that the data and software is kept up to date, bugs get fixed, testing is ongoing, and there are regularly scheduled data releases. We’ve done the math, and keeping PUDL running costs Catalyst approximately $166,000 per year.
Introducing The PUDL Sustainers program
As we enter 2025, we’re excited to launch the PUDL Sustainers Program–a crowdsourced effort to raise capital and build a powerful community of users to help inform the direction of PUDL!
Typically, open source projects rely on a blend of grants and donations to keep their lights on. Grant funding remains an essential resource for us in supporting the development of new tooling and datasets, but there is plenty of other work that we do on PUDL that needs more consistent funding. We want to fill this funding gap with users who find enough value in PUDL to provide financial support and contribute to its direction. We believe that if the cost of ongoing maintenance for the project is distributed amongst our user community then PUDL will be a better, more reliable tool for all.
That’s where you come in! We’re asking organizations and individuals who use PUDL data to become PUDL Sustainers by contributing financially to the project.
Sustainers will receive the following perks:
- Help keep PUDL regularly updated and freely available to the public under an open license. You are closing the gap on information asymmetry in the US energy system.
- Your role in sustaining PUDL is acknowledged on the project website, GitHub repository, in Catalyst’s social media posts, presentations, and other public forums.
- Funders above the Kilowatt level: You’re invited to participate in PUDL’s quarterly planning process. If we fundraise more than our target budget, this will include the ability to propose and vote on additional PUDL enhancements to work on in 2025!
Visit our Open Collective profile to learn more about the program, see how much capital we’ve raised, and become a Sustainer yourself!