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October 30, 2024 | Tom Ballard

New Department of Energy portal provides open, accountable energy information for future data economy

The Open Energy Hub is a connection hub of datasets from various sources including federal, state, academia, and private sector entities.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Electricity, in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), 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 and the Outage Data Initiative Nationwide.

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.



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