Boulder Housing Coalition
To make energy data more easily and widely available to the academic research community
Though federal agencies make high quality data on the U.S. energy system publicly available, the data is often shared in hard-to-use formats that cannot easily be linked with other data or incorporated into the state-of-the-art computational models often used by researchers. The effort needed to prepare such data for academic analysis is a barrier to use in the energy systems research. The Catalyst Cooperative is a team of data scientists, led by Christina Gosnell, who are dedicated to making unwieldy energy datasets easily accessible for researchers. Over the next two years, Catalyst Cooperative researchers plan to curate nine new energy-related datasets into their open source data library, including data on electricity generation, natural gas utilities, pipeline safety, electricity market contracts, and greenhouse gas emissions. Grant funds also support efforts to make needed improvements to their platform to accommodate growth and improve user experience, to help researchers work with this data library, and to perform analysis related to a variety of important energy issues, including planned research on the thermal efficiencies and environmental attributes of power plants. The Boulder Housing Collective acts as the fiscal sponsor for Catalyst Cooperative.