Catalyst Cooperative

About

Founded in 2016, Catalyst Cooperative is a co-op headquartered in United States specializing in Solar, Wind, Energy Storage.

Catalyst Cooperative is an open-source data platform cooperative founded in 2016. The organization focuses on making public energy system data accessible and usable for stakeholders working on climate policy and renewable energy transition. Their flagship project, the Public Utility Data Liberation (PUDL) platform, automatically cleans, integrates, validates, and publishes US energy data from federal agencies including the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). PUDL extracts and structures data from hundreds of thousands of PDFs covering plant-level generation, fuel consumption, utility finances, and operational costs. The cooperative uses this data infrastructure to support advocacy campaigns for fossil fuel plant retirement, utility asset securitization policies, and renewable energy procurement. They provide custom analysis, dashboards, and open datasets to environmental nonprofits, research institutions, policymakers, and clean energy advocates. Notable projects include coal cost crossover analysis demonstrating that 80% of existing coal plants are more expensive to operate than new wind or solar, hourly emissions factor modeling, and utility financial transition planning tools. All software is published under permissive open-source licenses and data uses Creative Commons Attribution licensing.