page_title: Open energy system databases
section_title: Renewables.ninja
hierarchical_section_title: Open energy system databases / Open energy system database projects / Renewables.ninja
caption_attribution_description: English: Screenshot from the Renewables.ninja photovoltaics and wind energy database website showing simulated photovoltaic output for a site in northern Italy for the year 2014
context_page_description: Open energy system database projects employ open data methods to collect, clean, and republish energy-related datasets for open use. The resulting information is then available, given a suitable open license, for statistical analysis and for building numerical energy system models, including open energy system models. Permissive licenses like Creative Commons CC0 and CC BY are preferred, but some projects will house data made public under market transparency regulations and carrying unqualified copyright.
  The databases themselves may furnish information on national power plant fleets, renewable generation assets, transmission networks, time series for electricity loads, dispatch, spot prices, and cross-border trades, weather information, and similar. They may also offer other energy statistics including fossil fuel imports and exports, gas, oil, and coal prices, emissions certificate prices, and information on energy efficiency costs and benefits.
  Much of the data is sourced from official or semi-official agencies, including national statistics offices, transmission system operators, and electricity market operators.
context_section_description: Renewables.ninja is a website that can calculate the hourly power output from solar photovoltaic installations and wind farms located anywhere in the world.  The website is a joint project between the Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland and the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.  The website went live during September 2016.  The resulting time series are provided under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license and the underlying power plant models are published using a BSD-new license.  As of February 2017, only the solar model, written in Python, has been released.
  The project relies on weather data derived from meteorological reanalysis models and weather satellite images.  More specifically, it uses the 2016 MERRA-2 reanalysis dataset from NASA  and satellite images from CM-SAF SARAH.  For locations in Europe, this weather data is further "corrected" by country so that it better fits with the output from known PV installations and windfarms.  Two 2016 papers describe the methods used in detail in relation to Europe.  The first covers the calculation of PV power.  And the second covers the calculation of wind power.
  The website displays an interactive world map to aid the selection of a site.  Users can then choose a plant type and enter some technical characteristics.  As of February 2017, only year 2014 data can be served, due to technical restrictions.  The results are automatically plotted and are available for download in hourly CSV format with or without the associated weather information.  The site offers an API for programmatic dataset recovery using token-based authorization.  Examples deploying cURL and Python are provided.
  A number of studies have been undertaking using the power production datasets underpinning the website (these studies predate the launch of the website), with the bulk focusing on energy options for Great Britain.
caption: Screenshot showing simulated photovoltaic output for a site in northern Italy for the year 2014
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