Open data in the solar thermal community: Status, barriers, and opportunities

• Open data has significant potential for the solar-thermal community. • Several datasets relevant to the solar-thermal community already exist. • Cost data and plant statistics datasets are valuable but currently hard to utilize. • Considerable barrires for publishing open data exist that need to be addressed. • Guidelines, a common data portal, funding incentives, and showing proof of benefits may increase data sharing. Open data can trigger new value-added services, enable more transparent research, and make information available to a broader audience. Especially in the field of renewable energy, this might help to contribute to a greener future and reduce carbon emissions. However, there are legal, technical and economic challenges, which might discourage data owners from sharing their data – and inhibit the leverage effect of open data. To better understand the barriers and opportunities of open data, this study provides an analysis of open data in the solar thermal field. It investigates what datasets are already available, the challenges in publishing and using the open data, its potential impact, and ways to encourage more open datasets. The results support the common belief that open data is useful, offering considerable benefits to data re-users and the solar thermal community. While considerable open data already exists, some datasets like plant statistics and cost data are hard to utilize due to licensing, accessibility and quality issues. Moreover, crucial datasets seem to be missing. Regarding publication, the analysis shows that data owners benefit less from publishing data compared to data re-users and service providers. While data sharing nevertheless seems appealing to data owners, severe and diverse barriers discourage data sharing, especially among private companies. To address these challenges, providing clear guidelines and establishing dedicated repositories could improve the quality of open data and boost data owners’ confidence. Additionally, facilitating open data in funding schemes or publishing data with a specific re-use in mind might help promote publishing open data, as it makes the benefits more tangible to the data owners.