Construction and Application of the Micro-level Engineering, Environmental, and Economic Detail of Electricity (MEEDE) Dataset, Version 2

The Micro-level Engineering, Economic, and Environmental Detail of Electricity (MEEDE, Version 2) dataset provides a unit-level representation of the United States electricity sector based on public sources. The data draw on a disparate set of engineering, environmental, and economic data, primarily from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, to characterize all utility-scale electric generating units in the U.S. in terms of their physical inputs of energy, outputs of electricity and pollution, generating and pollution control equipment configurations, and economic costs (capital, labor, energy, and materials) associated with their operation. The combination of complete unit-level physical details of the US grid with economic characteristics is a key distinction between the MEEDE data and other publicly-available sources. The MEEDE data provide a highly-valuable tool for generating descriptive statistics and supporting advanced partial or general equilibrium modeling efforts that require technology-rich representations of the U.S. electricity grid. We demonstrate how these data can be integrated into social accounting matrices for use in economy-wide modeling applications.