This is work in progress and supposed to become a link list to sources of open energy related data. We focus on collecting links to data relevant for the modelling of energy and electricity systems and markets. You are welcome to fill in the missing spots and non-existing pages. Also, you are welcome to extend the list of relevant data that we should collect links to in the future.
Open data sources for energy modelling
Open datasets related to energy are listed here by type.
Electricity demand
See Electricity demand
Thermal demand
See Thermal demand
Transport demand
See Transport demand
Industrial demand
See Industrial demand
Power Plants
See Power plant portfolios
Weather data
Weather data can be used to generate profiles for wind, solar and hydro power plants. Re-analysis or “hindcast” projects use state-of the art weather forecast models with long time series of weather observations. They create consistent series of weather data, often of decades and with a global scope. Reanalysis.org and NCAR provide a helpful overview of re-analysis models. Data are usually provided in GRIB or NetCDF format and can be very large in size (100s of GB).
- OPSD compiled a list of weather data sources and provides a script to download customized subsets of the MERRA-2 dataset
- Renewables.ninja allows users to download weather data (wind speed, solar irradiance, temperature) for specific locations based on MERRA-2 and satellite imaging data.
- The Hans-Ertel-Centre for Weather Research has published two preliminary reanalysis data sets (COSMO-REA6 and COSMO-REA2) containing the most often requested variables that may be used without any restrictions
- COSMO (Consortium for Small-scale Modelling), simulation model for weather in Europe, used for the official weather forecasts. The model is free to use for research applications
You may have a chance to get data directly from national weather services or participating universities/institutions and thus avoid having to run it yourself. For Germany, the current resolution is 2.8 km.
- The Climate Data Center (CDC) of the German Weather Service (DWD) has puslished a dataset of
- observed parameters from DWD stations,
- derived parameters at the station locations,
- gridded fields covering Germany,
- regional averages for Germany and its federal states,
- gridded fields covering Europe,
- global climate station data
- available at hourly, daily, monthly, annual or multi-annual resolution.
- The data is useable without restrictions provided the source "Deutscher Wetterdienst" is mentioned.
Projects to turn weather data into renewable power availability time series
Various projects exist that transform weather data into power availability time series for different solar/wind power plant model types, such as the Aarhus University RE Atlas, a light weight open source alternative of the former atlite, the oemof feedinlib or renewables.ninja.
Wind profiles
OPSD summaries European historical wind generation time series
Solar profiles
OPSD summaries European historical solar generation time series
Wind geographical potentials
See Wind geographical potentials
Biomass potentials
See Biomass potentials
Hydroelectricity data
See Hydroelectricity data
Electricity transmission network datasets
See Transmission network datasets
Electricity distribution network datasets
See Distribution network datasets
Gas network datasets
See Gas network datasets
Technology assumptions (costs, efficiencies, lifetimes)
See Technology assumptions
Efficiencies and specific consumptions of end-use technologies
TODO: Efficiencies or specific consumptions of end-use technologies (e.g. vehicles [litres/km], etc.)
Demographic and Socio-Economic Data
TODO: population trends, GDP trends, discount rates.
Environmental data
TODO: biodiversity, health impacts, water extraction, water use, emission factors.
Historical data
TODO: historical data on load, generation, emissions, market prices, etc.
Prospective data
Energy scenarios (e.g. for results comparison):
TODO: projections on parameters and technology costs.
Country-specific policies and targets
Greenhousegas (GHG) reduction targets:
RES shares, sector-specific targets, subsidies and feed-in-tariffs:
- IEA Policies and Measures [4]
- European Commission National Action Plans [5]
- RES Legal [6]
TODO: Criteria for power plant siting (e.g. exclusion zones for wind turbines).
Wikipedia page
The Wikipedia page open energy system databases lists some of the more developed portals serving open energy system datasets.
Other lists of energy-related open datasets
- datahub.io category "Energy" has more datasets
- Energypedia is a wiki platform for collaborative knowledge exchange on renewable energy and energy access issues in the context of development cooperation.
- Enipedia (TU Delft) is an active exploration into the applications of wikis and the semantic web for energy and industry issues.
- European Data Portal
- IEA ETSAP energy technology data source (E-Tech-DS) is a series of four-page technology briefs similar to the IEA Energy Technology Essentials (filter for "essentials"). The page contains short technical descriptions of 29 energy related technologies from power production, synthesised fuels, and fossil fuel production.
- International Association of Energy Economists (IAEE) Energy Data Links (EDL) provides a searchable database of energy-related resources
- OpenEI features a wiki of crowd-sourced energy information and a database of single source data on buildings, energy, efficiency, consumption, demand, potential.
- OpenEnergy Database was started with the requirements gathered in the first openmod meetings and was developed completely open with support of the openmod community. Input and result data from research of energy system studies are available via an API. The OEDB provides some automated visualisations of the available data.
- Open Power System Data has an extensive collection of links to data sources (Electricity consumption, Capacity and generation by fuel, Power plant data, Hydro power data, Prices and related data, Weather data, Wind and solar power time series, Country-specific data portals).
- OurEnergyPolicy.org Resource Library is a free online energy resource library updated weekly.
- PFBach.dk, a collection of wind and solar in-feed profiles
- reegle is a data provider of country energy profiles, energy statistics and a directory of relevant stakeholders. It also offers the clean energy search and an extensive glossary. There is also an insightful clean energy blog with interesting and up-to-date background information.
Data sharing techniques
The Open Knowledge foundation promotes the use of its data package standard. It consists of using CSV for payload (data) and a file package.json to attach machine-readable metadata. The page links to many examples of existing, curated and maintained datasets that adhere to this standard. Additionally, they drive the creation of a software ecosystem that can create and digest this format. Due to its simplicity, using data packages does not depend on this ecosystem.
GitHub repositories are another pragmatic way of sharing "small" (up to about 10 MB) datasets. A fun example is the Bundesgit, a collection of all German federal laws under version control. New laws or modfications are tracked as commits, allowing to "see" how a dataset -- laws, in that case -- evolve over time. The repository openmundi/world.db shows a more data-focused way of using Git, or GitHub, for collaborative collection of data. However, it clearly shows the limitations of using a version control system for code on data.
An upcoming and (technically) promising project is dat, which "is a version-controlled, decentralized data tool for collaboration between data people and data systems." Or, simply: Git for data. It is currently in public beta test, but has come a long way already.
Help finding energy data
Feel free to add scripts here, by creating a new wiki page, or place them on Github Gists.
Data organization ideas
A scheme similar to http://us-city.census.okfn.org/ might be useful for mapping out what types of data are available where.
