Opendatasoft, a data portal solution provider, announced it is partnering with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Electricity, to provide the technology for its new open energy data portal.
Envisioned as an experimental platform for the future energy sector data economy, the Open Energy Hub is a connection hub of over 70 datasets from over 50 sources such as federal, state, academia, and private sector entities. It provides information and visualizations on details such as energy usage, supply, and availability. It includes the Outage Data Initiative Nationwide (ODIN) Dashboard, which provides a real-time map of power outages and their causes across the United States, as well as data on electric vehicle (EV) charger capacity from a range of providers.
Free to access, the portal is run by ORNL and is funded by the Office of Electricity at the DOE. Rather than hosting data directly, it provides a central catalog to let users find and access relevant data, in an effort to help create a sector-wide data ecosystem to drive digitalization and decarbonization. To aid discoverability the portal applies consistent metadata across all data assets, while every dataset undergoes a data triage process for privacy, security, and confidentiality.
“Our underlying goal is to create a data ecosystem, providing an example for utilities and other electric sector data creators and custodians, encouraging them to share their data by showing it can be achieved quickly and easily,” said Supriya Chinthavali, Critical Infrastructure Resilience Group leader at ORNL. “We want data consumers and providers to seamlessly work together, understanding each other’s needs and eventually improving the quality of data.”
Opendatasoft already works with companies within the energy sector, including UK Power Networks, Scottish & Southern Energy Networks, Northern Ireland Electricity Networks (all UK), Endeavour Energy (Australia), EDF (France), Elia (Belgium), and EDP/E-REDES (Portugal).
Portal users include the general public, utilities, and the energy sector research community, including academia and other national labs. As these users have a wide range of different needs, Opendatasoft said, so the portal is able to deliver data in a variety of ways. Users can see map views and charts, in addition to accessing data through APIs or downloading the dataset in common file formats.
“Data sharing is central to driving decarbonization and collaboration across the expanding energy ecosystem,” said Jean-Marc Lazard, CEO and co-founder of Opendatasoft. “While there are a wide range of data sources available, it can be difficult for users to discover and access the best data assets for their needs. Through its “catalog of catalogs” approach, the Department of Energy’s Open Energy Hub aims to overcome this challenge, and we look forward to working with them as the portal grows rapidly, helping to underpin the energy transition.”
The portal first launched in May 2024 and is being continually updated with new datasets. ORNL also plans to increase the number of visualizations and invite other national laboratories to share their data. Users can submit requests via the Open Energy Hub for new datasets if it is not currently available on the portal.
Earlier this week, Vibrant Clean Energy (VCE), Pattern Energy, Catalyst Cooperative, and GridLab have released the Resource Adequacy Renewable Energy (RARE) Power Dataset, which provides an open-source solar and wind dataset for power systems planners. The collaboration was announced as part of the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG) Fall Technical Workshop.
In a report released last year, Weather Dataset Needs for Planning and Analyzing Modern Power Systems, ESIG detailed the need for accurately modeling the impacts of weather variables on resource adequacy and system reliability in increasingly weather-dependent power systems.
With support from GridLab, Catalyst Cooperative will host and distribute the renewable energy dataset. The data includes hourly solar, onshore, and offshore wind production published at a county granularity by aggregating 3 km data for the contiguous United States. The first release contains data for the years 2019-2023, while a further release in Q1 2025 will contain data for 2014-2018. The foundations for this dataset are weather variables produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s High-resolution rapid refresh (HRRR) operational numerical weather prediction model. The approach has been used to inform real-world processes, such as developing a dataset for the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) in 2020.
