Towards FAIR and open data ecosystems in the energy research community

The EU funded Horizon 2020 project EERAdata came successfully to a close in February 2023 after three years of intense and enthusiastic work. The EERAdata consortium, coordinated by Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, has been praised by the European Commission’s Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency for having delivered exceptional results with significant impact.

While the access and sharing of transparent, re-usable and integrated energy data is critical for monitoring and implementing sustainable transition pathways, the majority of energy databases are not (yet) fit for this purpose: EERAdata has developed, tested and implemented a FAIR (i.e. Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable) and open data ecosystem in the energy field, and in parallel built a pool of data stewards that can support the energy research community towards fit-for-purpose data practices. 

Six workshops

The project partners – Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL), Izmir University of Economics (IUE), Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA), the Central Mining Institute in Poland (GIG) and the European Energy Research Alliance (EERA) - have actively engaged with the wider low carbon energy research community in Europe across a series of six workshops to establish a community-based ecosystem and to put FAIRification in the energy domain into practice.

Web-based community platform

The main outputs are the EERAdata Community Platform, a web-based community platform with practical tools such as the Metadata Creator, and the EERAdata wiki, an open knowledge base for the energy research community.

The project has also produced a number of short videos, which can be a good introduction for those who are not familiar with the topic of FAIR data.

The researchers

Led by Valeria Schwanitz, Professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences, the team at HVL comprised August Wierling, Heather Arghandeh Paudler and Constantin von Beck and has been very active in the recent years in research on energy transition and social innovation.

Other EU projects

They have also been part of several EU projects such as COMETS, DRES2Market and Whitecycle and have produced a documentary “Power to and by the people” to show how citizens can shape the sustainable energy future in Europe.

More info on EERAdata and access to its results and publications 

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement NO 883823.