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eia-860m

EIA's monthly inventory of US power plants (EIA-860M), for the infrastructure layers

What it does

Installs one file, EIA-860M's monthly generator workbook (about 14 MB), under /usr/local/share/hammunition/data/eia-860m/. Nothing reads it on its own: hammunition maps infra import --from-eia turns the operating plants in your map regions into a layer for QMapShack, Navit, phones and the browser map, one point a plant with its operator, technologies, nameplate megawatts and generator count, named "Power plants (EIA-860M )".

Why you would want it

Where the grid's generation is, and how big each plant is, matters when the grid is down: which towns sit near a hydro or a peaker, where a plant's own staff and fuel are. OpenStreetMap's power layer places more plants (Vermont's rooftop solar arrays among them) but rarely carries capacity, fuel or status; EIA's carries all three for every plant of 1 MW or more.

Before it will work

Map regions installed (hammunition install osm-regions): the import keeps what lies in their boxes. QMapShack, Navit or the browser map to see the layer.

How it installs

  • data (Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration (Aug 2026), public domain, https://www.eia.gov/about/copyrights_reuse.php): https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m/xls/august_generator2026.xlsx (13,955,142 bytes)

Known problems

US only (wri-power-plants covers other countries). Plants under 1 MW are not in EIA-860M. The workbook's address changes the month after it is published, so an install from EIA fails after that until the pin is regenerated or moved, unless a LAN mirror holds the pinned copy. The import reads the workbook's 56 MB operating sheet row by row; it takes a few seconds.

Keeping it current

  • probe: none
  • strategy: reinstall
  • A new month about the fourth week of the next. The weekly pin review runs scripts/gen_eia860m_pin.py --check, which goes red when a newer month is out or the pinned month has moved to EIA's archive; scripts/gen_eia860m_pin.py pins the newest month (a 14 MB download) and --follow-move keeps the pinned month at its archive address after checking the archive's copy has the pinned digest.

Where to get help with the software itself

EIA's electricity data team, through the contact on https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m/; Hammunition only converts the workbook.

Source: catalog/packages/eia-860m.yaml