4 | Low-carbon energy and energy efficiency policies

The motivation for this use case is the significant role of policies, laws, and regulations in catalyzing the transformation of the energy system towards greenhouse gas and energy efficiency. They provide the ground for accelerating research and innovation, incentivizing behavioral changes, and safeguarding the necessary transformation processes. Through their texts and specifications, policies, laws, and regulations are not only defining the space for the application of energy technologies and low-carbon energy materials, but they also provide the framework for market activities in general. An example is the enabling of new actors to appear on the energy market (e.g. prosumers, community energy, and energy cooperatives).

Currently, a new role for data on low-carbon energy and energy efficiency policies is emerging. The need to provide documentation on compliance with regulations is starkly increasing in complexity as integrated monitoring and assessment across fields and economic sectors are increasing. This not only refers to international compliance requirements (e.g. National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, Progress Reports for Sustainable Development Goals), but also to the level of companies whose produces have to adhere to given standards and documentation has to be provided for the entire supply chain (c.f. Ly et al. 2015 on a review of business process compliance approaches).

Machine-actionability of relevant policy databases from local to global scale is therefore key for automated tracking, compilation, and inter-comparison with peers. Here, new business opportunities are arising. Overall, the state about the application of FAIR data principles is still in its infancy.

Openness is by nature less of an issue for this Use Case, but a specific challenge originates from mixed data formats, which include texts as well as number formats. Examples of databases from which EERAdata starts the use case activities include the IEA policy & measures databases, SETIS research and innovation data, ResLegal, JRC in-house methodology for Monitoring R&I in Low-Carbon Energy Technologies, InnovationDB or activities, and tools developed in H2020 project ODYSSEE-MURE.

Name of database Type of metadata provided Extend of metadata provided Level of implementation of FAIR/O principles Frameworks for metadata used Technical implementation of metadata
COMETS Inventory Administrative – partly (source of information, Tracking of updates); Rights – to be defined soon None, but intended to have: Deep descriptive metadata by ontology None none, but aiming for ontology currently excel headers, but RDF intended
IEA Policy database administrative, descriptive, rights, structural Administrative – intrinsic; Descriptive – extrinsic; Rights – intrinsic and extristic (separate document is also available); Structural – intrinsic F1: yes, F2: no (not even the DC standards), F3: yes, F4: yes, A1 – yes, A1.1: yes, A1.2: ? (there is a login option on the site, however no noticed a restriction on access to data for the guests), A2 – yes, I1 – no, because of the problem with metadata, I2 – no, I3 – no (Sometimes there is no link to the source document. For publications that are a transposition of EU law, there are no links to relevant EU documents. Update date information is not associated with a local page, so there is no possibility to check at the source, if the policy has been already updated.), R1: no, R1.1 – yes; R1.2 – no; R1.3 – no (not even the DC standards) thesaurus LOD and plain text
EUR-Lex Administrative, Technical, Descriptive, Structural, Rights Administrative – intristic, Technical – intristic, Descriptive – extristic, Structural – intristic, Rights – intristic and extristic (separate document is also available) F1: yes, F2: yes, F3: yes, F4: yes, A1: yes, A1.1: yes, A1.2: ? (there is a login option on the site, however no noticed a restriction on access to data for the guests) A2: not sure, I1: yes, I2: no, I3: yes, R1: yes, R1.1: yes, R1.2: (Meta)data are associated with detailed provenance, but not found a machine-acceptable format R1.3: yes thesaurus LOD, RDF, plain text
JRC database hub Administrative, Descriptive, Structural, Rights Administrative – intristic, Descriptive – extristic, Structural – intristic, Rights – intristic and extristic (separate document is also available) F1: yes, F2: partly fulfilled (a lot of metadata are available, but they are not always actual), F3: yes, F4: no, A1 – yes, A1.1 – yes, A1.2 – no, A.2 – yes, I1 – yes, I2 – no, I3 – yes, but update date information is not associated with a local page, so there is no possibility to check at the source, if the source document has been already updated, R1 – yes, R1.1 – yes, R1.2 – yes, R1.3 – yes thesaurus plain text, RDF, LOD, xml, csv