Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

The PUDL project grew out of our own work as climate advocates in Colorado. Our familiarity with electric utility data in that context led to our participation in a foundation-funded analysis of the economics of Colorado‚ coal plants. This analysis revealed that the operating costs of many plants were higher than the all-in costs of building new wind facilities. Building on this success, the project expanded to ~15 other utilities and states, necessitating scalable, programmatic access to the same FERC and EIA data. We realized the nationwide data would also make other advocates more effective, and made it freely available.

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Best Estimate of GHG Avoidance/Reduction of This Project (Tonnes CO2 Equivalent/Year):

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Catalyst is incorporated as a worker cooperative. It is democratically governed and equally owned by all members. Any future profits not re-invested into the business will be distributed on the basis of member patronage -- the proportion of overall hours worked that are attributed to each member. We are a woman-led business with project management, meeting facilitation, and much of our technical decision-making guided by our president, Christina Gosnell. All of our operations are motivated by our conviction that free and open source software, open access to data, and transparent modeling are essential to accelerating the transition to clean energy. Whenever possible our software and the data products that result from it are licensed as liberally as possible, using the MIT and Creative Commons Attribution Licenses, which allow the widest possible range of users to leverage our software and data for the greatest impact.

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