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
Power Plants
See Power plant portfolios
Weather data
Weather data can be used to generate profiles for wind, solar and hydro power plants.
- 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.
- National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Climate Forecast System (CFS), worldwide hourly reanalysis weather data, currently 0.2 deg spatial resolution. You need an account to get access to the downloads, but as the data is from a public US institution, it is free.
Projects to turn weather data into power availability
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 or 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
Wind geographical potentials
Hydroelectricity data
See Hydroelectricity data
Transmission network datasets
See Transmission network datasets
Distribution network datasets
It would be useful to have reference datasets of e.g. distribution networks in the city/suburb/countryside for different regions of the world.
Costs
"Recent cost estimates for distributed generation (DG) renewable energy technologies are available across capital costs, operations and maintenance (O&M) costs, and levelized cost of energy (LCOE). Use the tabs below to navigate the charts. The LCOE tab provides a simple calculator for both utility-scale and DG technologies that compares the combination of capital costs, O&M, performance, and fuel costs. If you are seeking utility-scale technology cost and performance estimates, please visit the Transparent Cost Database website for NREL's information regarding vehicles, biofuels, and electricity generation."
http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech_cost_data.html
Historical data
TODO: historical data on load, generation, emissions, market prices, etc.
Other lists of energy-related open datasets
- Enipedia (TU Delft) is an active exploration into the applications of wikis and the semantic web for energy and industry issues.
- Energypedia is a wiki platform for collaborative knowledge exchange on renewable energy and energy access issues in the context of development cooperation.
- 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.
- 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.
- OpenEI features a wiki of crowd-sourced energy information and a database of single source data on buildings, energy, efficiency, consumption, demand, potential.
- datahub.io category "Energy" has more datasets
- PFBach.dk, a collection of wind and solar in-feed profiles
- 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).
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.
