Overview
The Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) is the National Laboratory of the Rockies' annual projection of cost and performance for US electricity generation and storage technologies. It is the standard reference for capacity-expansion and production-cost modelling in North America, and a common benchmark elsewhere.
We carry both published editions: the 2025 ATB (v1 workbook) and the 2024 ATB (v3 workbook). Read either year on its own, or put them side by side. Each edition projects every technology under three cost cases:
- Advanced, assuming aggressive technology innovation
- Moderate, the ATB's central case
- Conservative, assuming minimal technology advancement
What's included
Headline metrics across the full technology and resource-class matrix, each in all three cost cases:
- CAPEX (USD/kW) and levelized cost of energy (USD/MWh)
- Overnight capital cost (USD/kW), in the 2025 edition only
- Capacity factor, by resource class
- Fixed and variable O&M (USD/kW-yr, USD/MWh)
- Fuel cost (USD/MMBtu) and fixed charge rate
Technologies cover land-based, offshore and distributed wind; utility and distributed PV; CSP; geothermal; hydropower; pumped storage; nuclear, including the microreactor new to 2025; biopower; coal and natural gas, with their CCS variants and retrofits; batteries at utility, commercial and residential scale; and PV-plus-battery hybrids. Each is broken into the ATB's own resource classes.
Those classes are what make the workbook hard to navigate. The Data Explorer tab makes every technology and class searchable, and charts them side by side.
| 2024 edition | 2025 edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Workbook | v3 | v1 |
| Horizon | 2022–2050 | 2023–2060 |
| Dollar year | 2022 USD | 2023 USD |
| Financial case | R&D | Without Tax Credits |
| Series | ~176 per metric | ~178 per metric |
What's new in the 2025 edition
- Projections run to 2060, a decade further than 2024.
- Nuclear microreactors (an advanced sodium-cooled design) and biopower with 95% CCS join the technology list.
- Geothermal projections were updated to reflect recent advances.
- Overnight capital cost gets its own summary table.
- Tax credits enacted as of July 2025 are represented in a separate financial case. The tables shown here are the without-tax-credits case, which is the closest counterpart to the 2024 edition's R&D case.
Comparing the editions
The explorer's Compare mode plots each technology from both editions at once, in one colour per technology: the 2025 line solid, the 2024 line dashed. It covers the years the two editions have in common, 2023 to 2050.
Both editions appear as published, and they use different dollar years: 2024 is in 2022 USD, 2025 in 2023 USD. Some of the gap between two lines is therefore inflation rather than a changed view of what a technology costs. Treat the comparison as directional unless you deflate the series yourself.
Source and attribution
Data from the NLR Annual Technology Baseline, 2025 edition and 2024 edition, © Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, released under CC BY 4.0. Please cite as:
- Mirletz, B., et al. (2025). 2025 Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) Cost and Performance Data for Electricity Generation Technologies [Data set]. National Laboratory of the Rockies / Open Energy Data Initiative.
- Mirletz, B., et al. (2024). 2024 Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) Cost and Performance Data for Electricity Generation Technologies [Data set]. National Laboratory of the Rockies / Open Energy Data Initiative. DOI: 10.25984/2377191.
Bayesian Energy is not affiliated with, and does not produce or endorse, this dataset. The figures are reproduced and visualised as published at source. When using this data, please cite the original authors per NLR's guidance.