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The National Research Data Infrastructure Germany (NFDI) aims to systematically assess valuable data from science and research, and make them usable sustainably and qualitatively for the entire German science sys- tem. With NFDI4Energy as a consortium driven by German energy system researchers heavily involved in ener- gy informatics, the first energy consortium in this field has been established in 2023. The keynote will give in- sights into the motivation for and main challenges in this area, thus showing which community services NFDI4Energy will deliver to the research community including industry and public partners. The talk will link these project goals with European activities in research data management and show connections to topics of international standardization.

nfdi4energy is a new consortium recommended for funding in the third and final funding round of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). It focuses on energy system research which heavily rely on modelling and (co-)simulation-based approaches. Tracking of models together with all data creates a complex software and data management challenge, which needs to be addressed in each research project. Therefore, the handling of research data and software presents a key motivation for nfdi4energy. To this end, nfdi4energy covers the whole research and transfer cycle of projects in energy system research ranging from (1) identifying relevant competencies for a research field; (2) defining relevant scenarios and experimental setup; (3) integrating models and data, coupling tools and laboratories; (4) extracting results, facilitating public consultation; to (5) identifying research challenges for follow-up activities. We define the following key objectives for nfdi4energy: (1) Establish common research community services for FAIR data, models, and processes in energy system research and motivate its use in the community. (2) Allow traceability, reproducibility, and transparency of results for the scientific community as well as for the society, improving the overall FAIRness. (3) Enable and motivate the involvement of society for the identification and solution of relevant research questions. (4) Promote better collaboration and knowledge transfer between scientific research institutes and business partners via FAIR research data management. (5) Simplify identification, integration, and coordination of simulation-based models. (6) Integrate the provided services for energy system research within the wider NFDI ecosystem to improve cross-domain collaboration. With our poster we would like to present the general ideas behind nfdi4nergy and discuss possible connection points to energy system research, especially reflecting the needs of the research community.

The NFDI4Ing Conference 2022 took place online on 26 and 27 October2022. The authors would like to thank the Federal Government and the Heads of Government of the Länder, as well as the Joint Science Conference (GWK), for their funding and support within the framework of the NFDI4Ing consortium. Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) - project number 442146713. If not stated otherwise within the respective document, the files go by CC-BY 4.0 license. Please refer to the license comments in the resprective slide decks.

Research software in the energy domain becomes increasingly important to analyze, simulate and optimize energy systems and, therefore, supports the required transition of energy systems as an important part to tackle the climate crisis. To make energy research software more findable, it should be described with metadata following the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) criteria and be registered in a common registry. Within the doctoral research project, a metadata schema to describe energy research software and an according registry will be developed. With these artifacts, the software gets easier to find and, thus, its reuse is supported.

The necessary transformation of energy systems towards net zero greenhouse gas emissions provides a plethora of new research challenges. New interconnections between different energy sectors, such as power, heat and mobility, increase the system's complexity. In this context, the digitalisation towards cyber-physical energy systems (CPES) alleviates change, and equally affects technical, social, and societal topics, as well as the mode of research in the CPES research community. Research efforts towards CPES heavily rely on modelling and (co-)simulation-based approaches. Tracking of models together with all data creates a complex software and data management challenge, which needs to be addressed in each research project. To this end, nfdi4energy covers the whole research and transfer cycle of projects in energy system research ranging from (1) identifying relevant competences for a project; (2) defining relevant scenarios and experimental setup; (3) integrating models and data; coupling tools and laboratories; (4) extracting results, facilitating public consultation; to (5) identifying research challenges for follow-up activities. We define the following key objectives: (1) Establish common research community services for FAIR data, models, and processes in energy system research and motivate its use in the community. (2) Allow traceability, reproducibility, and transparency of results for the scientific community as well as for the society, improving the overall FAIRness. (3) Enable and motivate the involvement of society for the identification and solution of relevant research questions. (4) Promote better collaboration and knowledge transfer between scientific research institutes and business partners via FAIR research data management. (5)Simplify identification, integration, and coordination of simulation-based models. (6) Integrate the provided services for energy system research within the wider NFDI ecosystem to improve cross-domain collaboration. To fulfil these objectives, nfdi4energy concentrates on five key services to provide a non-discriminatory access to digital research objects: (1) Competence to help to navigate the interdisciplinary research field, (2) Best Practices to get information about successful conduct of research including research data management, (3) Registry to find suitable data and software, (4) Simulation to couple existing simulations and, therefore, reuse software artefacts, and (5) Transparency to involve more stakeholders in all research stages. With these services, nfdi4energy aims to develop and provide an open and FAIR research ecosystem in the energy system domain containing a large share of common workflows from data gathering to the inclusion into research software, together with data publications for researchers spanning from single component development (like battery storage systems or other new smart grid equipment) up to system-of-systems research (based on mathematical or analytical models).

The researchers working in the project ZLE developed an “Open Science Declaration” committing their research activities to the standards of Open Science. Research within the ZLE will be built upon the idea of sharing scientific methods, data, and publications to improve research quality and make results accessible to the scientific and non-scientific communities. Members of the ZLE support the principles of Open Science as expressed by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Berlin Declaration, the Horizon 2020 Program, and the German Strategy for Open Access. Funded by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, one of the major goals of the ZLE is to make energy research activities and its resources available for public use while preserving the intellectual property of all involved parties. This will strengthen the research in Lower Saxony by promotion and expansion of cooperation between science and industry on strategic sectors. Moreover, greater transparency in the use of public funds and in the development of research activities is enabled.