What We’re Doing
Our proposal to the Sloan Foundation was funded! This means we’ve got 2 years of support to work on integrating a bunch of new data, automation of our ETL pipeline, and improving access to the results, some of which we outlined in our 2021 infrastructure roadmap. In combination with the client work we’ve been engaged in, this means we’ll need to recruit a new member to the co-op. We’re trying to figure out what skills and experience we are actually short on, relative to what we need to get done.
We continue to update our documentation, as we prepare for a new software and data release. A lot of it is related to the development environment, contributing, and how to run the ETL as it is now, while the user-facing side of the docs will hopefully be much simpler, directing folks to use preprocessed data with a Docker image that’s available on Zenodo, or our JupyterHub, or Datasette. We’ve set a deadline for the release of April 19th, which is also our next Advisory Board meeting.
We decided to simplify our branch management on GitHub. Instead of having separate ephemeral sprint branches, we’re just branching off of and making PRs against dev, and merging back into main after each 2 week long sprint, which seems to be far more common among open source projects, and is a lot less to try and keep track of. It should also mean we don’t have to re-direct lingering PRs to different base branches.
Data Wrangling Galore: Austen has been cleaning up the FERC Form 1 fuel table to capture previously discarded records that need information from other rows to make sense. Christina continues to work on estimating plant operating costs based on FERC+EIA linkages we’ve developed for RMI, and still need to merge into the main PUDL repo. Zane is trying to make our unit and prime-mover level heat rate estimates more robust and complete.