Public Utility Data Liberation Project (PUDL) Data Release

v2026.2.0 (2026-02-12)

This is a quarterly PUDL data release, and includes quarterly updates to data sources that are released continuously, like EIA-930, bulk EIA electricity API data, EPA CEMS hourly emissions and EIA-860M. This is also our first release of the FERC EQR company identifiers table, and tables from USDA’s Rural Utility Service (RUS) forms 7 and 12, which collect financial and operational information about rural utilities in a manner similar to EIA Form 861 and FERC Form 1. FERC EQR data is now available for download, though in a slightly different location due to its scale. Along for the ride are improvements to accuracy, memory performance, and Zenodo handling. See below for all the details.

New Data

RUS 7

• Extracted data for ten USDA RUS tables. See #4897 and PR #4906.

• Transformed and published USDA RUS tables. See #4885, PR #4939, PR #4971 and PR #4974.

RUS-12

• Extracted data for twelve USDA RUS tables. See #4900 and PR #4916.

• Transformed and published USDA RUS tables. See #4901, PR #4970 and PR #4979.

FERC EQR

• Added the company identifiers (CID) table from EQR. See #4851 and #4967. Also, note that the actual FERC EQR data is available on PUDL Viewer as well as on S3 for direct download

Expanded Data Coverage

• Updated DOIs for the EIA-191 and EIA-757a (they pertain to natural gas) since we extract them, even though we don’t process the data yet. This added 2 more years to the EIA-191 data. See PR #4879.

EPA CEMS

• Updated EPA CEMS hourly emissions data through December 2025. See #4986 and #4990.

EIA-860M

• Updated EIA-860M with monthly data through December 2025. See #4983 and #4993.

EIA-923

• Updated EIA-923 with monthly data through November 2025. See #4984 and #4993.

EIA-930

• Updated EIA-930 data through December 2025. See #4985 and #4995.

EIA Bulk Electricity API

• Updated the EIA Bulk Electricity data through November 2025. See #4987 and PR #5001.

EIA-176

• Updated EIA-176 data through 2024. See #5000 and #5005.

Documentation

• Added a data source documentation page for the FERC EQR. See #4852 and PR #4879.

• Added data access instructions for the FERC EQR and created examples specific to our larger (>1GB) and partitioned tables in the PUDL Data Dictionary. See issues #4869, #4951 and PR #4958. Affected tables include:

  • core_epacems__hourly_emissions

  • core_ferceqr__contracts

  • core_ferceqr__quarterly_identity

  • core_ferceqr__quarterly_index_pub

  • core_ferceqr__transactions

  • out_vcerare__hourly_available_capacity_factor

Bug Fixes & Data Cleaning

• We added an automatic script to help match FERC and EIA utilities with near-identical utility names as part of our ongoing data updates. As a result, we have matched an additional 115 utilities and resolved a small handful of cases where a FERC utility was mapped to more than one PUDL ID. Through this process, we also identified a bug that was resulting in us assigning the least common utility name and prime mover code to records to harvested EIA records when there were inconsistent values reported. Fixing this resulted in overall improved accuracy of the data. 3,650 utilities were reassigned names, resulting in approximately 150 additional matches to SEC 10K filings. 86 generators were reassigned prime mover codes, resulting in re-allocated net generation. See #1317, #4934 and #4913, as well as PR #4975.

Performance Improvements

• Improved memory performance of EIA-930 by translating transforms to use duckdb.

Quality of Life Improvements

• Consolidated local and remote Zenodo cache management under a single API that uses the high-level abstraction of the upath.UPath class. See issue #4860 and PR #4870.

• Pulled the list of Zenodo DOIs that define the raw input data used by PUDL out into a stand-alone settings file, rather than hard-coding them in the PUDL Datastore module. This makes the DOIs more easily accessible for use in other contexts, such as when calculating the GitHub Actions cache hash. Also made the GitHub Actions cache more lenient, so that if it misses on an exact cache key, it will just download the most recent cache of inputs. This should reduce the amount of data we need to download to run the CI on GitHub and speed things up slightly. It also means we can be more selective about when the zenodo-cache-sync workflow is run. Now it is only triggered when the zenodo_dois.yml file is changed, not any time the Datastore module is changed. See issue #4494 and PR #4870.

• Modernized the datapackage.json metadata stored on Zenodo for the Census DP1 data source, enabling the removal of a special case in the Datastore that only existed to deal with very old archive metadata. See PR #4879.

• Data source documentation pages now display the source data concept DOI with a link to the archive on Zenodo. See PR #4879.

• Made a change to the Datastore that allows it to obtain metadata from a datapackage.json file stored on Zenodo, even if the data referenced by the data package is stored on GCS, as is the case with FERC EQR. See the FERC EQR archive on Zenodo as an example. See PR #4879.

• Added handling to pudl.transform.classes.StringCategories so that the categories key of transform params can be specified as a Path to a YAML file. This will make it possible to include large categorization sets without the params Python files becoming unwieldy. See PR #4978.

Other PUDL v2026.2.0 Resources

• PUDL v2026.2.0 Data Dictionary
• PUDL v2026.2.0 Documentation
• PUDL in the AWS Open Data Registry
• PUDL v2026.2.0 in a free, public AWS S3 bucket: s3://pudl.catalyst.coop/v2026.2.0/
• PUDL v2026.2.0 in a requester-pays GCS bucket: gs://pudl.catalyst.coop/v2026.2.0/
• Zenodo archive of the PUDL GitHub repo for this release
• PUDL v2026.2.0 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.
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• 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
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