EIA Electricity Data

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) publishes the official US energy statistics. The electricity branch covers retail sales, prices, and revenue by state and customer sector; net generation and fuel consumption by fuel type; plant-level operating data; operable-generator inventory; and, via the SEDS and CO2 branches, the emission factors used to convert generation into carbon. It is the standard source for electricity-sector calibration, including the brown-electricity emission factor in Pedersen (2026). This page is the distilled access recipe.

• Cost: free, no paywall.
• API key: free but required (bare requests are rejected).
• Coverage: monthly/quarterly/annual electricity series by state and sector, generally from 2001; plant-level and hourly grid data on their own histories.
• Home: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/ · API docs: https://www.eia.gov/opendata/documentation.php

Access

Register a key

Get a free key at https://www.eia.gov/opendata/register.php (instant email). Store it in the environment (e.g. .env as EIA_API_KEY=...); never hard-code it. The same key works across all EIA branches (coal, natural gas, petroleum, SEDS, …), not just electricity.

Pull a series (API v2)

API v2 is a browsable route tree. Each leaf /data/ endpoint takes one or more data[] metrics, optional facets[...][] filters, and a frequency. Query the parent route (no /data/) to discover the available data columns, facets, and frequency values first.

import os, requests
key = os.environ["EIA_API_KEY"]
r = requests.get(
    "https://api.eia.gov/v2/electricity/retail-sales/data/",
    params={
        "api_key": key, "frequency": "annual",
        "data[0]": "price", "facets[stateid][]": "CA",
        "start": "2022", "end": "2023", "length": 5000,
    },
)
rows = r.json()["response"]["data"]   # period/stateid/sectorid/price/price-units

The electricity sub-routes: retail-sales (sales, revenue, price, customers by state and sector), electric-power-operational-data (generation and fuel consumption by fuel type), rto (daily/hourly grid operations), facility-fuel (individual plants), operating-generator-capacity, and state-electricity-profiles. For emission factors and CO2, use the seds and co2-emissions branches.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

The reason to read this page rather than the EIA docs. Verified against live keyed pulls on the date above.

• The data[0] / facets[...][] brackets are real and must survive the shell. With curl, the [ and ] are glob metacharacters: the request silently returns an empty body until you pass -g (or --globoff). In Python’s requests, pass them as literal param keys ("data[0]": "price") and it works. A blank response is almost always this, not an auth failure.
• You must name at least one data[] metric. A leaf /data/ call with no data[0]= returns metadata-style output or an error, not the series. Pick the column (price, sales, revenue, customers, generation, …) explicitly.
• 5000-row JSON cap, with a quiet warning. Each call returns at most 5000 rows; beyond that you get a "warnings": [{"warning": "incomplete return"}] block and silently truncated data. Constrain with facets, start/end, or paginate with offset; do not trust an unpaginated bulk pull.
• Codes, not labels, in facets. Fuel types are codes (COW = all coal, NG = natural gas, …), sectors are numeric IDs, states are postal codes plus Census-region aggregates (e.g. location: 90 Pacific). Pull the facet’s value list from the parent route before filtering.
• Sales price is cents per kWh, sector-split. retail-sales price is in cents/kWh and is reported per sectorid (residential, commercial, industrial, transportation, and ALL); do not average sectors naively. Generation is in thousand megawatthours.
• Some endpoints are deprecated mid-flight. The CO2 aggregates endpoint, for example, is marked deprecated, see SEDS. Check the route’s name/description for a redirect before standardizing a pipeline on it.

Endpoints you actually need

Route (under /v2/electricity/)	What it is	Key data columns
retail-sales	Sales, price, revenue, customers by state & sector	price, sales, revenue, customers
electric-power-operational-data	Net generation & fuel use by fuel type	generation, total-consumption
facility-fuel	Plant-level operations	generation, consumption
operating-generator-capacity	Operable generator inventory	nameplate-capacity-mw
rto	Daily/hourly grid demand & interchange	value

Outside /electricity/: /seds/ (State Energy Data System, including emission coefficients) and /co2-emissions/ for carbon.

Standard operations

• Electricity prices: retail-sales price (cents/kWh); filter to one sectorid and state, and state the sample window.
• Generation mix / emission factors: electric-power-operational-data generation by fueltypeid; convert to CO2 with the SEDS coefficient for the fuel and vintage you need. Pedersen (2026) calibrates its brown-electricity factor at ~0.82 kg CO2/kWh; EIA’s published coal factors run somewhat higher, so use the paper’s number only as its stated calibration, not as the EIA coal factor.
• Always paginate or constrain to stay under the 5000-row cap, and keep the facet codes (fuel, sector, state) documented next to any aggregate.

Citation

U.S. Energy Information Administration. Electricity data. Washington, DC: EIA. Cite the specific series or table and your access date, e.g. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electricity retail sales (annual, by state and sector), accessed YYYY-MM-DD, https://www.eia.gov/opendata/.