The OPSD project
Open Power System Data is a free-of-charge data platform dedicated to electricity system researchers. We collect, check, process, document, and publish data that are publicly available but currently inconvenient to use. The project is a service provider to the modeling community: a supplier of a public good. Learn more about its background or just go ahead and explore the data platform.
Our objective
We want to make life easier for power system modelers. Our goal is to help researchers focus on research and avoid redundant work when collecting, preparing, and aggregating data. We also hope to improve the quality of data and documentation.
Scope
The platform provides data on installed generation capacity by country/technology, individual power plants (conventional and renewable), and time series data. The latter includes electricity consumption, spot prices, and wind and solar generation, both measured and derived from weather models.
User-friendly
We aim at keeping our data clearly structured, well documented, internally consistent, and easily accessible. The scripts used for downloading and processing are open-source, version-controlled, and available through GitHub. For machine readability and easy integration we follow the Data Package convention and publish data primarily as CSV files and metadata as JSON files (Excel and SQLite files are also available). To facilitate reproducibility, all data as well as all scripts are version-controlled and available through stable URLs. Learn more about our IT approach.
An award-winning platform
Open Power System Data won the Open Science Award Schleswig-Holstein and is among the laureates of Land of Ideas.
Open source and open data
Currently, energy data is often subject to quite restrictive terms of use (examples). We try to do better: the scripts that we use to process data are open source and available under the MIT license on GitHub. The text on this website is published under CC-BY. It is our goal to provide all data on this platform free of charge to anyone without restriction on its use, including commercial applications. We would like to publish all data under a Creative Commons Attribution license, an open license that allows any use and derivative work. However, at this point, several data owners do not allow us to do so. Beware that some data published here might be subject to copyright.
The target group
This platform is made for energy professionals such as modelers and analysts in academia, consulting firms, and industry. Journalists, the general public, and electricity traders are not our primary target groups. We provide boring CSV files rather than fancy visualization. We focus on long historical time series rather than high frequency updates of real-time information.
Team
Open Power System Data and its data packages are actively maintained (current funding until 2020) by Neon Neue Energieökonomik, Technical University of Berlin, ETH Zürich and DIW Berlin. On our Background page, we explain the history of the project.
Get involved!
From the very beginning, we involved users in a series of public workshops. We have coordinated with various projects that follow similar goals and with the Open Energy Modelling Initiative. Stay up to date by subscribing to our newsletter. If you would like to be involved, contact any member of the project or Jonathan Mühlenpfordt (muehlenpfordt [at] neon-energie [dot] de or +49-178-137 2 731). You are also invited to share your own Data Packages through our platform, if it fits with the overall vision for the project.
