NFDI4Energy – National Research Data Infrastructure for Interdisciplinary Energy Systems Research

In the NFDI4Energy project, RLI scientists are working with partner organizations to establish an infrastructure for research data from energy system analysis. These structures are intended to support relevant scientific workflows – from data acquisition and their integration into research software to data publication and knowledge dissemination.

Making data available across disciplines

The transformation of energy systems poses challenges for research: New connections between different energy sectors, such as electricity, heat and mobility, increase complexity. For successful research work, data from these areas must therefore be available transparently and be easy to use.

The main goal of the NFDI4Energy project is to make data, models, and processes from energy system research available across disciplines for further work. The infrastructure covers the entire research and transfer cycle of projects in energy system research: From identifying relevant competencies for a project, defining scenarios and experimental setups, integrating models and data, coupling tools and laboratories, extracting results, facilitating public consultation, and identifying challenges.

Improve collaboration and knowledge transfer

The establishment of the shared research data infrastructure serves to make results, for the scientific community, reproducible and transparent, and thus to optimize knowledge transfer in the research community. The joint management of research data is also intended to improve collaboration and knowledge transfer between research institutions and commercial enterprises. Services for non-discriminatory access To enable different stakeholders from research, industry, society and politics to use the new infrastructure, non-discriminatory access to research results, data and artifacts, is particularly important. The project team will therefore provide five main services that support a large part of common workflows from data acquisition to integration into research software. For example, users will be able to find suitable data and software just by registering or to couple existing simulations and reuse software artifacts.

Role and competences of the RLI

The scientists of RLI bring their long experience in the development of open tools, IT infrastructures and their application for digitized energy system research to the project. This includes expertise in the development of energy-specific databases such as the Open Energy Platform (OEP), expertise in scenario comparisons, appropriate licensing of software and data, as well as the development and implementation of the Open Energy Ontology (OEO).

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Project period: 01.03.2023 – 29.02.2028

• Building a common research infrastructure for data, models and processes.
• Promoting collaboration and better knowledge transfer between research institutions and commercial enterprises through research data management.
• Reproducibility and transparency of research results.
• Facilitating integration and coordination of simulation-based models.
• Integrate the provided energy systems research infrastructure into the broader NFDI infrastructure to improve cross-disciplinary collaboration.
• Engage society in identifying and solving relevant research questions.