The Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity, in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has launched an experimental platform for energy sector-related data with enhanced emphasis on governance and usability. The Open Energy Hub is a connection hub of datasets from various sources including federal, state, academia and private sector entities that provides information and visualizations on details such as energy usage, supply and availability. 

Project lead Supriya Chinthavali acknowledged many open data portals exist, but the Open Energy Hub is novel in its data triage process and in being a “catalogue of catalogues.” With open data sharing comes sensitivity and privacy concerns. This is where the team’s data triage process comes into play, helping determine the privacy risk level for each dataset.

The team initially adopted the concept based on the United Kingdom’s energy data strategy where open data triage was introduced. The team had to consider open data when building an open data portal.

“We really started to think about creating a data ecosystem as opposed to a siloed set of data management platforms,” said Chinthavali, Critical Infrastructure Resilience group leader at ORNL. “We want data consumers and providers seamlessly working together, understanding each other’s needs and eventually improving the quality of data.”

Chinthavali notes the open portal is a two-way exchange: Users can pull data from the hub and add energy data to the catalog. So far, the hub includes data and metadata from approximately 100 sources, including ORNL databases such as the Environment for Analysis of Geo-Located Energy Information, or EAGLE-I, and the Outage Data Initiative Nationwide, or ODIN. 

External data is available from partners such as the Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment Deployment and Grid Evaluation tool for electric vehicle charger capacity data, as well as the Maryland Emergency Management Agency’s statewide power outage data map. Each individual contributor hosts its own data, allowing rapid expansion while keeping DOE’s costs relatively low. Open Energy Hub’s user experience also includes data profiling, a term that means users can see a visual example of the data in a chart, map or graph before downloading the entire data set, Chinthavali noted. 

The ORNL team provides a risk score for each data set, with the goal of opening all data sets at least to some degree, even if they weren’t shareable previously. ORNL’s role is sifting through the data and providing the cleanest data possible to the public. 

“We sit with each PI and ask questions such as ‘What is the likelihood of a particular issue happening and, if it happens, what is the impact?’” Chinthavali said. 

Open Energy Hub users could be anyone, Chinthavali said, as it’s open to the general public. However, she envisions frequent users will be within the energy sector research community, including academia and other national labs. These users represent a wide range of case studies, which is why the team enabled the hub with flexibility for data exploration. Users can view maps and charts, as well as access data through application programming interfaces or download the entire dataset.

And if the data a user hopes to find isn’t there?

“We’re encouraging submission of those requests because this is where DOE can really understand where the data gaps are and do something about it,” Chinthavali said. 

The Open Energy Hub can be accessed at https://openenergyhub.ornl.gov/. 

The Department of Energy’s Energy Data Catalog and Portal is an exploration of a comprehensive digital platform designed to facilitate access to a wide range of energy-related data for researchers, policymakers, industry professionals and the public. This initiative aligns with the DOE’s commitment to transparency, innovation and collaboration in energy research and policy development. This effort and instantiation are brought to you by the DOE Office of Electricity.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science. 

This Oak Ridge National Laboratory news article "New DOE portal provides open, accountable energy information for our future data economy" was originally found on https://www.ornl.gov/news