Municipal Open Data for Business Models in the Energy Industry

Practical example and current challenges

• Open data has great economic potential: For Germany, the economic value of open data is estimated at around 12 billion euros annually. Positive effects of open data result from the use of data in the economy, its potential for innovation, increased transparency and its potential for cost savings. In addition, open data plays an important role for future business models, especially in data-intensive processes such as those found in the energy industry.
• The focus of this use case is the interdisciplinary grid connection process, which requires a large amount of information and sub-processes from individual grid operators as well as a large amount of data from various sources, especially from public geographic information systems.
• The provision of data depends on the local data management, which is used by the offices on site, although there is no integrated common infrastructure. There is currently a technical and organizational challenge to transfer public data in a way that they are digitized as a public administration process and are available to the grid operators even though there is a lack of uniform semantics and access platform.
• Further challenges are the identification of the required data sources, the digitization of analog data sets as well as the quality assurance and development of price models for additional services that can be offered. In addition, concepts for organizational governance and data ownership must be clarified and data maintenance must be guaranteed.

What added value does the "GAIA-X project" offer?

• GAIA-X enables the central provision of data without media breaks and guarantees the quality assurance of the data provided. Thus, grid connection processes can be accelerated.
• The data required in the process can be unified and standardized based on a common semantics and access platform. In addition, the price of the required data is set and there is a role-based access control for various service levels.
• GAIA-X offers the required common infrastructure and enables the perfect transmission of public data from public administration to the grid operators. GAIA-X promotes the digitization of public administration processes and enables the improvement and added value of data-intensive processes as well as the development of future business models in the energy industry.

Use Case Team

• Sebastian Lehnhoff – OFFIS
• Mathias Uslar – OFFIS