NREL Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) for Electricity#
Source URL |
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Source Description |
The NREL Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) for Electricity publishes annual projections of operational and capital expenditures (by technology and vintage), as well as operating characteristics (by technology). |
Source Format |
Parquet |
Download Size |
13 MB |
Temporal Coverage |
2021-2024 |
PUDL Code |
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Unprocessed Source Data Archive |
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Issues |
Open NREL Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) for Electricity issues |
PUDL Database Tables#
We’ve segmented the processed data into the following normalized data tables. Clicking on the links will show you a description of the table as well as the names and descriptions of each of its fields.
Background#
NREL publishes Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) data for the Electricity and Transportation sectors.
The NREL Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) provides a consistent set of technology cost and performance data for energy analysis.
To inform electric and transportation sector analysis in the United States, each year NREL provides a robust set of modeling input assumptions for energy technologies (the Annual Technology Baseline).
The ATB is a populated framework to identify technology-specific cost and performance parameters or other investment decision metrics across a range of fuel price conditions as well as site-specific conditions for electric generation technologies at present and with projections through 2050.
Download additional documentation#
Data available through PUDL#
PUDL incorporates all NREL ATB data from 2021 through 2024. NREL publishes ATB on an annual basis since 2015, but only started publishing data about the transportation sector in 2020.
NREL has been publishing ATB as parquet files since 2019 alongside the excel workbooks. See issue #3576 for why we have not integrated the 2019 and 2020 parquet files.
Who submits this data?#
NREL ATB does not have respondents like utilities or plant operators submitting data the way that many other PUDL data sources do. NREL ATB is entirely developed by analysts at NREL as most of the data in ATB is projections about the future. NREL provides extensive documentation about how they’ve developed the ATB projections.
What does the original data look like?#
NREL has been publishing ATB in several formats: excel workbooks, CSV files, Tableau workbooks as well and parquet files. PUDL processes and republishes the parquet files, but if you’d like to explore any of the other formats they are easy to access on the ATB site. You can also access all of the formats on our Zenodo archive of raw NREL ATB data.
The workbooks are formatted well for exploring the data manually. The CSV and parquet
data is reported in a very skinny format that enables the raw data to have the same
schema over time. A column in the original data named core_metric_parameter
contains a string which indicates what type of data is being reported in the value
column. PUDL reformats this skinny table into four wider tables.
NREL also publishes extensive documentation. If there are any questions about their methodology or terms or variables, their documentation is a great place to start.
Notable Irregularities#
In the skinny parquet and CSV version of NREL ATB, the column
core_metric_parametercontains a string which indicates what type of data is being reported in the originalvaluecolumn. In PUDL, the skinny ATB data is transposed and normalized into multiple wider tidy tables, wherein most of the column names correspond to the strings in the originalcore_metric_parametercolumn.The convention for ATB data is to use an asterisk in the key columns as a wildcard in the parquet files. In processing the ATB data for PUDL, we remove these wildcard asterisks from the PUDL primary key columns by replacing these asterisks with all values available.
PUDL Data Transformations#
To see the transformations applied to the data in each table, you can read the
docstrings for pudl.transform.nrelatb created for each table’s
respective transform function.