Tag: zenodo

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Rescuing Historical FERC Data

UPDATE 2022-01-19: We have received word from FERC that access to the historical data discussed below will be restored this week. As it becomes available we will also archive it on Zenodo just in case. Thank you to everyone who reached out and helped bring this issue to FERC’s attention!

This week we discovered that decades worth of energy system data collected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) had been removed from the agency’s website. They apparently have no plan to archive it or migrate it to another platform. We are attempting to obtain a bulk download of all this data so we can archive it alongside our other raw data sources on Zenodo.

This data records many financial, operational, and economic aspects of the US energy system. It is a unique and valuable resource for anyone trying to understand how public policy and market conditions have shaped our energy system over time. Simply deleting this data with no warning, no plan to archive it, or migrate it to another platform is completely unacceptable.

If you know someone within FERC who can help get us a copy of this data to archive publicly, please put us in touch: hello@catalyst.coop

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Categories
updates

PUDL Infrastructure Roadmap for 2021

A couple of weeks ago I attended TWEEDS 2020 virtually (like everything this year) and talked about Catalyst’s ongoing Public Utility Data Liberation (PUDL) project, and especially the challenges of getting a big pile of data into the hands of different kinds of users, using different tools for different purposes. It ended up sketching out a bit of a PUDL infrastructure roadmap for the next year, and so we thought it would be a good idea to write it up here too.

We’ll have a separate post looking at our 2021 data roadmap.

The US Energy Information Asymmetry

PUDL is all about addressing a big information asymmetry in the regulatory and legislative processes that affect the US energy system. Utilities have much more information about their own systems than policymakers and advocates typically do. As a result, regulators often defer to the utilities on technical & analytical points. Commercial data exists, but it’s expensive. We want to get enough data into the hands of other kinds of stakeholders that they can make credible quantitative arguments to regulators, and challenge unfounded assertions put forward by utilities.

Federal Agencies and Their Favorite File Formats
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