---
title: "Open energy system databases"
chunk: 2/5
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_energy_system_databases"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:49:28.737080+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Open energy system database projects ==
Energy system models are data intensive and normally require detailed information from a number of sources.  Dedicated projects to collect, collate, document, and republish energy system datasets have arisen to service this need.  Most database projects prefer open data, issued under free licenses, but some will accept datasets with proprietary licenses in the absence of other options.
The OpenStreetMap project, which uses the Open Database License (ODbL), contains geographic information about energy system components, including transmission lines.  Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata and Wikipedia have a growing set of information related to national energy systems, such as descriptions of individual power stations.
The following table summarizes projects that specifically publish open energy system data.  Some are general repositories while others (for instance, oedb) are designed to interact with open energy system models in real-time.

 Three of the projects listed work with linked open data (LOD), a method of publishing structured data on the web so that it can be networked and subject to semantic queries.  The overarching concept is termed the semantic web.  Technically, such projects support RESTful APIs, RDF, and the SPARQL query language.  A 2012 paper reviews the use of LOD in the renewable energy domain.

=== Climate Compatible Growth starter datasets ===

The Climate Compatible Growth (CCG) programme provides starter kits for the following 69 countries: Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Benin, Botswana, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Côte d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Ecuador, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, Kenya, Laos, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Republic of Congo, Republic of Korea, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
The datasets are hosted on the Zenodo science archive site, visit that site and search for "ccg starter kit".

=== Energy Research Data Portal for South Africa ===

The Energy Research Data Portal for South Africa is being developed by the Energy Research Centre, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.  Coverage includes South Africa and certain other African countries where the Centre undertakes projects.  The website uses the CKAN open source data portal software.  A number of data formats are supported, including CSV and XLSX.  The site also offers an API for automated downloads.  As of March 2017, the portal contained 65 datasets.

=== energydata.info ===

The energydata.info project from the World Bank Group, Washington, DC, USA is an energy database portal designed to support national development by improving public access to energy information.  As well as sharing data, the platform also offers tools to visualize and analyze energy data.  Although the World Bank Group has made available a number of dataset and apps, external users and organizations are encouraged to contribute.  The concepts of open data and open source development are central to the project.  energydata.info uses its own fork of the CKAN open source data portal as its web-based platform.  The Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license is preferred for data but other open licenses can be deployed. Users are also bound by the terms of use for the site.
As of January 2017, the database held 131 datasets, the great majority related to developing countries.  The datasets are tagged and can be easily filtered.  A number of download formats, including GIS files, are supported: CSV, XLS, XLSX, ArcGIS, Esri, GeoJSON, KML, and SHP.  Some datasets are also offered as HTML.  Again, as of January 2017, four apps are available.  Some are web-based and run from a browser.

=== Enipedia ===

The semantic wiki-site and database Enipedia lists energy systems data worldwide.  Enipedia is maintained by the Energy and Industry Group Archived 29 November 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands.  A key tenet of Enipedia is that data displayed on the wiki is not trapped within the wiki, but can be extracted via SPARQL queries and used to populate new tools.  Any programming environment that can download content from a URL can be used to obtain data.  Enipedia went live in March 2011, judging by traffic figures quoted by Davis. 
A 2010 study describes how community driven data collection, processing, curation, and sharing is revolutionizing the data needs of industrial ecology and energy system analysis.  A 2012 chapter introduces a system of systems engineering (SoSE) perspective and outlines how agent-based models and crowdsourced data can contribute to the solving of global issues.
As of April 2019, the site has gone offline pending a move to the enipedia.org domain.

=== Open Energy Platform ===

The Open Energy Platform (OEP) is a collaborative versioned dataset repository for storing open energy system model datasets.  A dataset is presumed to be in the form of a database table, together with metadata.  Registered users can upload and download datasets manually using a web-interface or programmatically via an API using HTTP POST calls.  Uploaded datasets are screened for integrity using deterministic rules and then subject to confirmation by a moderator.  The use of versioning means that any prior state of the database can be accessed (as recommended in this 2012 paper).  Hence, the repository is specifically designed to interoperate with energy system models.  The backend is a PostgreSQL object-relational database under subversion version control.  Open-data licenses are specific to each dataset.  Unlike other database projects, users can download the current version (the public tables) of the entire PostgreSQL database or any previous version. The development is being led by a cross-project community.

=== Open Data Energy Networks ===