2021 Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) Cost and Performance Data for Electricity Generation

Starting in 2015, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has presented the Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) in an Excel workbook containing detailed cost and performance data for renewable and conventional electricity generation technologies. This version provides the final updates for the 2021 ATB, with data from 2015-2020 hosted on data.nrel.gov and 2021 onward in a cloud-optimized OEDI data lake. The data is documented on the website atb.nrel.gov.

Use Cases

• Modeling future energy system costs based on projected technology performance data.
• Comparing capital and operational expenditures between renewable and conventional generation technologies.
• Informing energy policy and investment decisions using current and forecasted cost benchmarks.

Strengths

• Data is updated annually, with a documented history from 2015 to the present.
• Includes both current and projected cost and performance metrics for multiple technologies.
• Provided in multiple formats, including Excel workbooks, Tableau files, and structured CSV summaries.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)

Collection Method

Compiled and presented by NREL in the Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) workbook.

Time Range

Data from 2015 onward, with this version providing final updates for 2021.