About the Data

Every number on EnergyAtlasUSA comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, through its public Open Data API.

Electricity prices

From the EIA's Electricity — Retail Sales series: the average price per kilowatt-hour paid by residential, commercial and industrial customers, by state, reported annually. This is a state average across every utility and rate plan that reports to the EIA — deregulated states have a range of real offers above and below it, and even regulated states have multiple utilities with different rates. It is not the number on any single bill.

Generation mix

From the EIA's Electric Power Operational Data: how many thousand megawatt-hours each state generated in the year, broken out by coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar and hydro. Anything outside those six categories (biomass, petroleum, geothermal, storage discharge, and a small amount of double-counted aggregate categories in the EIA's own fuel taxonomy) is grouped as "Other" rather than guessed at. Generation is reported annually — treat a state's mix as its most recent full reporting year, not a live feed.

Renewable share

Our own calculation: wind + solar + hydro generation divided by total generation, for the same year. We do not count nuclear or natural gas as renewable, and we do not count biomass (folded into "Other") as renewable either, to keep the definition simple and consistent across every state.

Natural gas prices

From the EIA's Natural Gas Prices series, delivered to residential, commercial and industrial consumers, by state, in dollars per thousand cubic feet (MCF). Not every state has a published series every year — where EIA has no figure, we show none rather than estimate one.

Gasoline prices

The EIA's weekly retail gasoline survey covers the national average plus only nine states (CA, CO, FL, MA, MN, NY, OH, TX, WA) at state level. State pages for those nine show the recent weekly trend for regular, midgrade, premium and diesel; other states don't get a gasoline section, because EIA doesn't publish one for them.

What's not here yet

A power-plant-by-power-plant directory (EIA's generator-level datasets) is planned for a later addition. It is not on the site today — we would rather ship fewer datasets, fully real, than pad the site with placeholders.