The Public Utility Data Liberation Project

PROJECT

open data

cooperative

energy

Fiscal Host: Catalyst Cooperative

Liberating US energy system data for easy use by people fighting climate change.

This is The Public Utility Data Liberation Project's page The Public Utility Data Liberation Project

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Budget

Today's Balance

$110,411.84

Estimated Annual Budget

$155,900

PUDL (2026)

$169,532

About

What is PUDL?

The Public Utility Data Liberation Project (PUDL, pronounced "puddle") is an open source data processing pipeline that makes US energy data easier to access and use programmatically. The goal of the project is ensure that people working in the public interest have free and open access to analysis-ready energy data.

Since 2017, with support from funders like the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the U.S. National Science Foundation's Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program, and NGOs like RMI and GridLab, we’ve been able to provide cleaned, connected and open-access versions of essential public energy datasets to help reduce information asymmetry in U.S. energy policy making and research.

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. 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 nearly $170,000 per year.

The PUDL Sustainers

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 help provide the project with 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.

Sustainers get the following perks:

Help keep PUDL regularly updated and freely available to the public under an open license. You are fighting 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.

PUDL 2025 Annual Report & 2026 Work Plan

We laid out what we accomplished last year in the 2025 PUDL Annual Report (PDF).
The Annual Report also lays out our 2026 budget and work plan, highlighting changes from 2025, and improvements that have been made to PUDL over the last year through external grant and client funding, as well as open source contributions.
We are actively seeking new institutional and individual sustainers to help fill in the $42,000 funding gap that remains in the second half of 2026.

Additional Resources

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News from The Public Utility Data Liberation Project

Updates on our activities and progress.

PUDL 2025 Annual Report

Since 2025 was the first year of funding our PUDL through contributions from sustaining members, we decided to write an annual report summarizing how it went in terms of the finances, the technical work, and some usage & impact metrics:...

Published on February 26, 2026 by Zane Selvans

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Financial Contributions

Custom contribution

Watt

Your contribution will help keep PUDL going strong! Watt contributors are encouraged to engage with PUDL directly through GitHub issues and discuss... Read more

Latest activity by

+ 8

Recurring contribution

Kilowatt⚡️

You are a part of keeping PUDL free and updated! You can participate in our quarterly PUDL work planning and prioritization process, and we’ll incl... Read more

Starts at

$8,000 USD / year

Latest activity by

Be the first one to contribute!

Recurring contribution

Megawatt ⚡️⚡️

You are a key part of keeping PUDL free and updated! You can participate in our quarterly PUDL work planning and prioritization process, and we’ll ... Read more

Starts at

$16,000 USD / year

Latest activity by

Recurring contribution

Gigawatt⚡️⚡️⚡️

You are a major part of keeping PUDL free and updated! You can participate in our quarterly PUDL work planning and prioritization process, and we’l... Read more

Starts at

$25,000 USD / year

Latest activity by