Public Utility Data Liberation Project (PUDL) Data Release

v2026.1.0 (2026-01-14)

This is a regular monthly data release, primarily intended to ensure that PUDL has the most up-to-date EIA-860M data. Along for the ride are the initial ETL for FERC EQR data, changes to the build system, and nicer units on a few columns.

Application, not Library

From now on we will treat PUDL like an application rather than a library that other projects are expected to install as a package and depend on. There’s no change in the licensing or openness of the project – this is just a technical evolution. Explicitly treating PUDL like a standalone application will make it easier for us to do releases and ensure that we have a reproducible environment. The packages which we’ve been distributing on PyPI and conda-forge have also had major dependency resolution issues for a while now.

It’s also been our experience that almost all users want the data, not the pipeline. The backend is primarily of interest to Catalyst developers and open source contributors, who will continue to work within the development environment. See Development Setup for instructions on how to set it up. See PR #4871 for where many of these changes were made.

• We are no longer publishing PUDL releases as packages on PyPI or conda-forge.

• Instead, PUDL will need to be installed from source, and is expected to be run in a locked environment, and not specified as a normal dependency in other projects.

• Tagged PUDL releases (corresponding to each of our data releases) will still be archived automatically on Zenodo as well as on our GitHub Releases page.

• PUDL data releases will continue to be distributed through a variety of channels. See Data Access for the details.

New Data

• Added a new ETL for FERC EQR data, as well as associated infrastructure for running the job and publishing outputs, which can be found at s3://pudl.catalyst.coop/ferceqr. There are 4 new tables which are produced by this ETL including, core_ferceqr__quarterly_identity, core_ferceqr__contracts, core_ferceqr__quarterly_index_pub, and core_ferceqr__transactions. Due to the size of this data, the tables are split into a set of parquet files partitioned by year-quarter, and cannot be downloaded as a single file like other PUDL tables.

Expanded Data Coverage

EIA-860M

• Updated EIA-860M with monthly data through November 2025. See #4903.

Bug Fixes & Data Cleaning

• Standardized max_steam_flow_1000_lbs_per_hour to max_steam_flow_lbs_per_hour. Units changed to “lbs_per_hour” and rounded to nearest 100 lbs in the core_eia860__scd_boilers and out_eia__yearly_boilers tables. See issue #4301 and PR #4810.

• Standardized steam_load_1000_lbs to steam_load_lbs. Units changed to “lbs” in the core_epacems__hourly_emissions table. See issue #4301 and PR #4810.

• Corrected incorrect column mappings in core_eia861__yearly_reliability and raw_eia861__frame that were introduced for 2024 data during the EIA 861 2024 data update. See #4907 and #4908.

Quality of Life Improvements

• Switched from caching Zenodo archives in GCS to AWS S3, using our free and public AWS Open Data Registry bucket at s3://pudl.catalyst.coop/zenodo. This will make it easier for open source contributors to run continuous integration tests, since no cloud credentials are required to download the raw data from S3, and they will not be subject to the flakiness of the Zenodo API. It will also allow us to access the raw PUDL inputs and associated metadata in environments where we may not easily be able to authenticate to GCS, such as Read The Docs. This was partly an attempt to mitigate the Error 429 “too many requests” responses we have started getting from Zenodo, described in #4856. See PR #4857.

• We’ve overhauled some of our tooling:

  • Instead of using conda or mamba / micromamba to manage dependencies we’ve switched to Pixi

  • The venerable setuptools has been replaced with Hatch

  • setuptools_scm has been replaced with hatch-vcs

  • Our make targets have been converted into Pixi tasks

  See issues #4604, #4872 and PR #4871 for more details.

Other PUDL v2026.1.0 Resources

• PUDL v2026.1.0 Data Dictionary
• PUDL v2026.1.0 Documentation
• PUDL in the AWS Open Data Registry
• PUDL v2026.1.0 in a free, public AWS S3 bucket: s3://pudl.catalyst.coop/v2026.1.0/
• PUDL v2026.1.0 in a requester-pays GCS bucket: gs://pudl.catalyst.coop/v2026.1.0/
• Zenodo archive of the PUDL GitHub repo for this release
• PUDL v2026.1.0 release on GitHub

Contact Us

If you're using PUDL, we would love to hear from you! Even if it's just a note to let us know that you exist, and how you're using the software or data. Here's a bunch of different ways to get in touch:

• Follow us on GitHub
• Use the PUDL Github issue tracker to let us know about any bugs or data issues you encounter
• GitHub Discussions is where we provide user support.
• Watch our GitHub Project to see what we're working on.
• Email us at hello@catalyst.coop for private communications.
• On Mastodon: @CatalystCoop@mastodon.energy
• On BlueSky: @catalyst.coop
• On Twitter: @CatalystCoop
• Connect with us on LinkedIn
• Play with our data and notebooks on Kaggle
• Combine our data with ML models on HuggingFace
• Learn more about us on our website: https://catalyst.coop
• Subscribe to our announcements list for email updates.