Events - Catalyst Cooperative

From Fall 2024 through Spring 2026 Catalyst will be organizing a series of seminars and workshops centered on familiarizing early-career researchers with US open energy data and open source tools and techniques for working with it. We will also include conferences or other events Catalysters want to share.

Upcoming Events

Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)

Sunday-Tuesday, October 26-28th, 2025, Atlanta GA
Event Page

We’ll be presenting at an open energy modelling session alongside pyPSA and Mosaic developers!

Open Energy Data For All Pilot: Working With Messy Data

Wednesday, September 10th, 2025
Event Page

We have spent the summer writing more content for our interactive workshop series on software skills for energy research data analysis & interpretation, this time on exploring messy data and creating a solid base for your research. We will be running a pilot of new material on Wednesday, September 10 from 2-5 PM Eastern time, and would love to see you there! We will cover:

Visual data exploration – what kinds of problems are common in energy data, and what are some strategies for identifying them?
Making assumptions about your data – what expectations might be encoded in different kinds of energy data research, and how can we evaluate their impact?

The material is intended for early-stage graduate students and researchers who have a little Python and Pandas but wish they felt more comfortable. A little bit of statistics (histograms, quartiles) will be helpful but is not necessary – we’ll cover the basics.

This is a pilot, and collecting feedback is our biggest goal. Your pickiness will be appreciated!

Past Events

The workshop in environmental
economics and data science (TWEEDS)

Friday & Saturday, April 25th-26th, 2025, Portland OR
Event Page

Catalyst’s Katherine Lamb and Zane Selvans will be presenting at TWEEDS. Katherine will be presenting on “Toward a Transparent Energy Transition: An Open-Source Dataset of Utility Corporate Ownership” and Zane on “Liberating US Energy System Data”.

Open Energy System Modeling with Kamran Tehranchi & Trevor Barnes

Thursday, Feb. 27th, 2025, 4:00-5:30 pm Eastern
Register for Free on Eventbrite

Kamran and Trevor will present on PyPSA-USA (GitHub), a novel, flexible, open-source and open-data energy system model designed for power system and multi-sector planning in the continental United States. Last year Kamran integrated Catalyst’s PUDL Project with the PyPSA-USA model to provide much of its input data.

Built on the Python for Power System Analysis (PyPSA) framework, PyPSA-USA is highly configurable to support planning with flexibility across sectors and spatial scales. The framework also offers flexible spatial resolution by allowing to switch between nodal and zonal transmission configurations, providing higher flexibility in spatial resolution than other open-source U.S. models. It integrates comprehensive data sources—including climate reanalysis data for renewable resource variability, sectorally explicit electric and thermal demand profiles, detailed generator and storage unit characteristics, and policy constraints to support diverse research goals. They will also present on energy system modeling insights from their research.

This is the third installation of a year-long workshop & seminar series focused on helping early career energy systems researchers get more familiar with data management and software development. There’s no cost to participants. This work has been supported by the Sloan Foundation.

Catalyst Cooperative is a worker-owned cooperative that scrapes, cleans and publishes free and open-source U.S. energy data through the Public Utility Data Liberation (PUDL) project.