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 (e.g. for a European energy system model) that we should collect links to in the future:
Data requirements for a European energy system model
Open data sources for energy modelling
Open datasets related to energy are listed here by type.
Other lists of energy-related open datasets
- 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.
- Open Energy Platform (OEP) and Open Energy Database (OEDB) 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.
- The Global Energy Monitor is a project that maintains trackers on global (i) coal plants, (ii) fossil infrastructure, (iii) coal mines, (iv) steel plants, and (v) the European gas infrastructure with a global gas plant tracker in development. The data underlying the several trackers can be requested.
- https://energydata.info/ features a collection of almost 600 open energy-related datasets put together by the World Bank Group.
- The FfE Open Data Portal offers free datasets for modelling energy demand and generation with a regional focus on Europe and Germany.
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
You can find a list of the latest questions on energy data sources on StackExchange: http://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/energy
Feel free to add scripts here, by creating a new wiki page, or place them on Github Gists.
Interactive data visualizations
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.
