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

• Version recorded: 2026-08
• Categories: emcomm, navigation-maps
• Upstream: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m/

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 )".

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.

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.

• 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)

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.

• 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.

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