The scheme, launched by the Energy Department’s SunShot Initiative, was originally called ‘Solar Bankability Data to Advance Transactions and Access’. It targets a reduction in soft costs by streamlining the collection, security, management, exchange and monetising of solar datasets across the solar industry’s value chain. The scheme will create an industry-driven standardised data landscape which will facilitate the growth and expansion of distributed solar.
As the solar market expands, the coordination and streamlining of collection, management and exchange of solar datasets becomes ever more critical, particularly those that affect the bankability of solar assets. This in turn will protect consumers, increase efficient pricing and support new and existing businesses entering the solar marketplace.
The first phase of the project will be to convene industry stakeholders to define data requirements. The second phase will formulate data taxonomies and interoperability standards, and the third phase will help adoption and the development of a data exchange marketplace. The overall objective is to standardise data in order to allow for a reduction in soft costs by sharing data and speeding up processes, particularly financing.
The DOE’s SunShot Initiative defines success of the project as the wide adoption of data standards by stakeholders representing at least 60 percent of the US solar industry, in terms of deployed and distributed solar assets.
Four partners will help to implement the plan. These partners are the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), SunSpec Alliance, kWh Analytics and the DOE’s own National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
SGIP will focus on eradicating inefficiencies in data exchanges and helping to integrate data standards across the life cycle of a solar project.
SunSpec Alliance will establish an open, easy-to-adopt solar data architecture and standards consisting of uniform data taxonomy, information models, data schemas, data exchange protocols, functional specifications for interoperability, compliance test suite and reference software. This in turn will enable the free flow of data between existing software products addressing critical aspects of the solar asset life cycle. The system will leverage the inherent capabilities of existing international data standards, extending them using uniform data taxonomy and combining them with common data exchange technologies, thereby establishing a basic dictionary for interchange of interoperable datasets created throughout the solar project lifecycle.
kWh Analytics will support the adoption of industry-led data standards, including the development of a data format translation software tool called Solar BabelFish. This will instantly translate the original data formats into data standards, significantly reducing the time required for their adoption and leading to 60 percent adoption of the standards byn the US solar market within two years.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will develop tools to convert paper-based solar records to machine readable formats and establish a marketplace for standardised solar datasets. This platform will provide an open source data repository, easy access to data housed on the internet, a central catalogue for solar energy data, a means to combine data, a gateway to common data standards and a searchable interface.
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