Data for the energy transition: Open Energy Platform has a new design

High quality data are important for the modelling and analysis of climate and energy scenarios. Where data are accessible and openly licensed, work with such data becomes more efficient and transparent and this work becomes reproducible. The Open Energy Platform, which is financially supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), makes such information freely available on the Internet, following the principles of Open Science. Together with some of its partners, the Oeko-Institut has now revised the platform and has integrated and openly licensed data from, for example, the Klimaschutzszenario 2050 study (Climate Action Scenario 2050, German only).

New web design for easy use

The newly designed website provides a revised, easily accessible design, thus making it even easier to access open data as well as the Open Energy Family open tools which are under continual development.

On the Open Energy Platform (OEP) scientists can:

• Locate and immediately utilise information. The OEP contains data including metadata – for example on emissions, energy consumption or electricity transmission capacities. It also includes fact sheets on scenarios and models. All this makes work with data more efficient overall.
• Document and publish data, codes and assumptions underlying their models, thus creating reproducibility and transparency.
• Communicate with the OEP by means of an application programming interface (API), for example in order to utilise own modelling data or to upload results. This may simplify modelling.

Principles, transparency and next steps

All data in the OEP are openly licensed and further use by third parties is expressly permitted. The nature of this license is always documented in the comprehensive metadata set. It contains information on context, sources, terms of use, and other specifications. The metadata are based on the FAIR Data Principles that make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

In their SzenarienDB project, the Oeko-Institut as well as the Fraunhofer IEE, the Reiner Lemoine Institute and the University of Magdeburg are jointly developing the Open Energy Platform as an open source project located on GitHub, with a focus on scenario data. Interested individuals may get involved with the OEP via GitHub and contribute to its further development.

One of the next tools to be published on the OEP is the Open Energy Ontology – a unified language for energy systems modelling. The ontology development is also a collaborative effort and takes place here on GitHub. The ontology will help in the collation of related datasets – for example of energy scenarios – and in making it even easier to find and utilise them.

Go to the Open Energy Plattform