Requirements for an Open Digital Platform for Interdisciplinary Energy Research and Practice

Energy systems are changing rapidly and energy research is fundamental to enable and optimize this change involving academics, practitioners, and the public. Therefore, an open digital platform to share knowledge and experiences is crucial for the energy sector. We identify and discuss requirements from 36 semi-structured interviews with various stakeholders for a platform based on five essential elements. The competence element enables researchers and developers to find suitable partners for their research and practice projects, and the best practices element delivers ideas to structure cooperative energy research. The repository element helps to find available data and frameworks for energy systems’ simulation and optimizations. Frameworks and models are coupled by using the simulation element. Last, results and contents from the energy community can be published within the transparency element to reach various interested stakeholders. We discuss implications and recommendations as well as further research directions

FAIR Metadata Standards for Low Carbon Energy Research—A Review of Practices and How to Advance

The principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR) have been put forward to guide optimal sharing of data. The potential for industrial and social innovation is vast. Domain-specific metadata standards are crucial in this context, but are widely missing in the energy sector. This report provides a collaborative response from the low carbon energy research community for addressing the necessity of advancing FAIR metadata standards. We review and test existing metadata practices in the domain based on a series of community workshops. We reflect the perspectives of energy data stakeholders. The outcome is reported in terms of challenges and elicits recommendations for advancing FAIR metadata standards in the energy domain across a broad spectrum of stakeholders

What’s going on in energy efficiency research? A platform to enhance the transparency of energy research funding in Germany

Public funding of energy research projects is a major pillar for developing new energy-efficient technologies and concepts. With European energy and climate targets driving such projects, it is becoming challenging to keep up with their ever-increasing number. Our contribution demonstrates how combining the expertise on energy efficiency and renewable energies, linguistic text processing and modern information technology can help to respond to this challenge and thereby render research funding more transparent and accessible to the public. We provide an overview of the German energy research funding information system ‘EnArgus’. This web-based system makes it possible to intelligently review and cluster the vast number of publicly-funded energy research projects in Germany carried out since 1970. The core element of the system is an ontology-assisted search engine derived from more than 2,200 short articles, which were specifically prepared for this purpose. These texts cover energy technologies as well as the related basic terminology and concepts. To illustrate the system, we provide an overview of its structure, its main components and a summary of its evaluation as well as important lessons learned from the project. The results of the evaluation indicate that the system is well suited to help structure and access the growing number of publicly-funded energy research projects