[Inaudible—Editor] the folks at the EIA directly as well. We know them well here in D.C. We actually provide some of our data to them, and of course we consume a lot of their data.
The EIA is literally in the U.S. Department of Energy building, but it is essentially its own independent office. It has its own funding and operates with the one and only goal of collecting data and providing forecasts. I wholeheartedly think that in data collection and provision, they do an outstanding job.
Frankly, with some others, I probably share some.... I've had my complaints about their forecasts, and I would not necessarily wholeheartedly endorse this model of an agency to do forecasting in Canada, but in collecting and providing data, they have a really important role. They've done a wonderful job of building a website that is pretty easy to use. The datasets can easily be downloaded into Excel and processed without paying for it in any way or without any kind of a firewall.
The data they provide really depends on the dataset. In some cases, it's monthly data. In some cases, it's annual. It includes natural gas storage levels, which are figures that can literally drive activity in the market every single week. There is import and export data on oil and gas, of course. On the electricity side, we find the plant-level data extremely useful in terms of their tracking literally every power plant in the U.S.
They have also really upped their game when it comes to trying to understand the level of generation now coming from photovoltaics on individual residential homes. That's actually becoming a bigger deal. It's obviously a very small percentage—I think way less than 1% of our power in the U.S. comes from rooftop solar—but it's growing. It has real implications, as one of your other witnesses would probably attest, for how we think about local utilities and how they interact.
Anyway, that's their general set-up. As I say, it's set up autonomously to some large degree, although I do believe the President appoints the head of the EIA. The person who has been the head of the EIA typically now is a non-partisan, academic type, and not somebody who brings to the job a real axe to grind on energy issues, necessarily.