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PUDL awarded NSF POSE grant

Introducing POSE

We are excited to share that the Public Utility Data Liberation Project (PUDL) and Catalyst Cooperative have been awarded a Pathways to Open Source Ecosystems (POSE) Phase I grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF)! This grant will fund a slate of community building and infrastructure projects to expand the PUDL community and facilitate contributions.

Why we pursued the POSE grant

Over the past few years, we’ve made substantial technical improvements to PUDL thanks to generous support from RMI, the Sloan Foundation, Climate Change AI, and the Mozilla Foundation. These improvements have made accessing PUDL data and adding new datasets easier than ever before.

We’ve spent time on community-building activities like developing relationships with open energy modelers, presenting at conferences, hosting office hours, and responding to questions on Github Discussions. We applied for the NSF POSE grant so that we can spend more time fostering the PUDL community and improving people’s experience working with public energy data.

Getting to know our community

Are you a researcher or analyst working with energy data or models? An environmental non-profit, clean energy advocate or data journalist working on the U.S. energy transition? A data engineer or open-source expert interested in contributing to the energy transition?

If so, we would love to talk to you! For the first step of our POSE grant, we’re conducting a series of half-hour interviews over the next month to better understand how people find, prepare, and work with energy data, the different contexts they’re working in, and what their biggest data pain points and challenges are. You can sign up using this link. Please spread the word and forward this link to anyone you think might be interested!

Our Focus Areas

With POSE funding, we’ll be working to get PUDL data into more hands and creating new opportunities to contribute back to the PUDL ecosystem. Here’s a glimpse into what’s in the works:

  • Exploring new front-end tools to make PUDL data easier to access: We’re busy prototyping an alternative to our existing UI tool. Stay tuned, we’ll be looking for users to give us feedback on our beta tool!
  • Creating new resources for PUDL users: We’ll be hosting a webinar aimed at nonprofits and developing new data access tutorials to make accessing our data easier than ever before.
  • Supporting PUDL’s contributors: We’ll be developing new resources and coordination practices for external contributors, and creating a contributor onboarding workshop. 
  • Addressing technical barriers to contribution: Whether refactoring memory-intensive tests, or improving our data validation framework using Pandera, Pydantic, and Dagster asset checks, we’re excited to implement some long-awaited improvements to support more distributed development.
  • Coming to a town near you!: We’ll be traveling to academic conferences, university brown-bags, FOSS meetups and more in order to present on the PUDL project and connect with other clean energy advocates.
  • Developing organizational models and governance practices to sustain our growing ecosystem: In conversation with our downstream users, we’ll be developing strategies to keep PUDL free, accessible and maintained in the long-term.

We’ll be sharing updates on POSE-funded projects on our socials, blog and newsletter over the coming months. If you want to learn more about any of these projects, get in touch via hello@catalyst.coop or drop by our office hours.

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updates

We hired a technical writer for PUDL!

Catalyst is very excited to announce that we have hired Nancy Amandi as a technical writer for PUDL’s Google Season of Docs project (full proposal here). The project will run from June through October, during which time Nancy will work on improving our documentation to make it easier for PUDL users to navigate and find the data they need.

Currently, it’s difficult for new (and long-time) PUDL users and contributors to quickly jump in and start using PUDL because our documentation is extensive and spread out between multiple repositories and websites. We have a data dictionary page in our docs, a Datasette deployment for exploring the data, and a set of example notebooks hosted on Kaggle, but none do a particularly good job of shepherding users to the data they want. The goal of this project is to create a better, more nested, system of table/column documentation so users aren’t overwhelmed by PUDL and know where to find the latest versions of the tables that are most relevant to them! 

If you’ve ever struggled to navigate the PUDL docs and have feedback, please send an email to hello@catalyst.coop, and we will incorporate suggestions into our plan for the project.

About Nancy

Nancy is a data engineer and technical writer living in Nigeria. She’s passionate about helping data-driven businesses write clear, concise documentation to convey complex technical concepts to a diverse range of audiences. In addition to her writing, Nancy has extensive experience in creating scalable data pipelines, exhaustive data mining, explanatory datasets, analytical models, and business reporting solutions with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. In 2023, Nancy and her team members won the Nigeria Energy Forum Tertiary Institutions Energy Pitch Challenge for their work on OneGrid Energies, a clean tech startup working towards closing the energy affordability gap in Nigeria.

Learn more about Nancy: LinkedIn, X, GitHub

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updates

Beating the Utility Holding Company Shell Game

We’re excited to be part of the Mozilla Technology Fund’s 2024 cohort, which is focusing on open source AI for environmental justice!

We’re going to use Mozilla’s support to link US Securities and Exchange Commission data about utility ownership to financial and operational information in the EIA forms 860/861/923, and through our previous record linkage work involving the EIA data, to FERC Form 1 respondents and the EPA’s continuous emissions monitoring system data.

The SEC Form 10-K is published through EDGAR as structured XBRL data, but the Exhibit 21 attachment that describes which companies own and are owned by other companies is unfortunately just a PDF blob that gets stapled to the XBRL, and so ownership relationships end up being unstructured, or at best, semi-structured data.

We’re going to apply document modeling tools that we’ve developed in some of our client work (to extract structured data from PUC and other regulatory filings) to extract the ownership information from Exhibit 21. This will hopefully include the ownership percentages when they are reported.

Then we’re going to use the generalized entity matching / record linkage tooling that we developed under our previous Climate Change AI Innovation Grant to connect the parent / subsidiary companies named in the SEC data to the financial and operational data reported by the same utility companies in FERC Form 1, as well as EIA and EPA data.

The record linkage / entity matching system that we’ve ultimately settled on is based on the excellent (and publicly funded!) Splink library, which relies on DuckDB to enable local linkages on datasets of up to tens of millions of records. Robin Linacre (one of the Splink maintainers) has a tutorial explaining the probabilistic model of record linkage used by Splink, if you’re interested in the internals.

Why is this work important? Being able to make effective energy policy often requires an understanding of the political economy of utilities, and utilities are often composed of Russian doll-like nested holding companies. It can be hard to see where one utility ends and another begins. Understanding which entities share ownership and thus political and economic interests is key to being able to grapple with and influence them.

We’ll be learning from prior work on this problem done by the folks at CorpWatch, and we hope to make the outputs of our work easy to visualize and explore through the Oligrapher interface that LittleSis has developed.

If this work is interesting or useful to you, we’d love to hear more about your use case! You can track our work through this GitHub repository. Also, while we are explicitly focused on and familiar with utilities, the SEC’s Form 10-K covers all publicly traded companies, so we may be producing additional data outputs that aren’t useful to us but which could be useful to others. If that’s you, please let us know.