Electricity Annual Technology Baseline 2025 Update Now Available
Update Reflects Maturation of Energy Technologies and Ever-Changing Energy Landscape
Today, the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) released the Electricity Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) 2025 Update, offering updated data to inform U.S. electricity sector analysis.
The Electricity ATB is a regularly updated hub of current and projected electricity technology cost and performance data sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Each year, NLR collaborates with several DOE national laboratories, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory, to update the data and assumptions, pulling from a variety of sources, including data provided by the DOE Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office.
The goal of the Electricity ATB is to facilitate transparency and consistency in energy analysis through the rigorous review and compilation of published sources and in-depth documentation of methods and assumptions. The continual updates help analysts keep pace with the rapidly advancing energy system.
“This release marks the next step in our efforts to provide energy analysts consistent, reliable data and assumptions,” Electricity ATB Lead Brian Mirletz said. “As the energy landscape continues to evolve, we’ll continue to deliver updated data that helps users tackle our most pressing energy challenges.”
What Is New This Year
For more than a decade, the Electricity ATB updates have brought valuable improvements, including the incorporation of new technologies, refined calculations, and usability features. This year’s update follows in that tradition by bringing improvements in data transparency, technology-specific projections, and representations of financial assumptions. Key 2025 updates include:
- Geothermal technologies: Updated projections and cost curves to reflect advances in geothermal technologies
- Nuclear technologies: Added nuclear microreactor technology with representation of an advanced sodium-cooled microreactor
- Time scale: Extended data to 2060 to support the analysis of the full life cycle of power plants built today
- Metrics references and descriptors: More clearly displayed references and evidence types for specific data points in visualizations such as Tableau
- Financial assumptions: Piloted a financial assumptions case that estimates costs based on cost drivers beyond research and development
- Tax credits: Provided representation of tax credit transferability and updates to tax credits to reflect 2025 legislation.
“We're thrilled to get these improvements to the ATB out to users,” Mirletz said. “In addition to the updates to the 2025 data, the expanded cost-drivers cases and the additional transparency around types of evidence should enable users to better understand and apply the data.”
Enabling Analysis of All Scales
Along with informing many of NLR’s flagship analysis projects, such as the Standard Scenarios, the Electricity ATB serves as a valuable resource for energy planners and grid operators around the world. More than 100,000 users across 144 countries turn to the Electricity ATB to supplement their in-house analysis capabilities and help them answer critical energy systems planning questions.
“The Electricity ATB enables us to evaluate a wider range of scenarios than would be available to us otherwise,” said Michael Jones of Platte River Power Authority. “This helps us make more informed decisions when considering what projects and power purchase agreements to advance, benefiting our customers, supporting grid reliability and helping us work collaboratively with our owner communities to achieve our shared energy goals.”
Electricity ATB data are made easily accessible to users of all backgrounds through a suite of products, including Excel workbooks, Tableau charts, an application programming interface, and open-source code. The ATB website is also a critical resource, housing detailed documentation including:
- Historical trends, current estimates, and future projections of three primary cost and performance factors: capital expenditures, capacity factor, and operations and maintenance costs
- Methodology and assumptions used to develop the projections of future cost and performance under conservative, moderate, and advanced technology innovation scenarios.
“Because of the level of detail provided by the ATB, users in need of electricity generation and storage costs can find the inputs they need at a variety of scales, whether it’s analyzing the payback period for a single site or modeling a large utility service area,” Mirletz said.
Stay Up to Date With ATB News
In addition to the annual update, the Electricity ATB team works throughout the year to answer questions and address concerns raised by ATB users. These updates and insights are shared with the ATB’s registered user base. Registered users are also the first to hear about the ATB’s resources in other sectors.
To get the latest information on Electricity ATB, visit the website and become a registered user.
Read more about NLR’s energy analysis research, and subscribe to NLR’s energy analysis emails to receive updates.
Last Updated April 28, 2026