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Despite the societal relevance of energy research, there is a distinct lack of citizen science initiatives in the field. This paper reports the experience of a participatory and innovative strategy to develop a citizen science initiative for solar energy research. A number of stakeholders participated in the definition and implementation of the initiative, and tools such as surveys and a hackathon were employed. The process described aims to provide a blueprint for transforming the relationship between citizens and research into societal challenges. Here we describe the collaborative process and analyse the main opportunities, limitations and future perspectives.

A more collaborative, interdisciplinary, open, transparent and reproducible science begins to be required by Public Funding Agencies along the world. This contribution explains how a real project funded by the European Commission and researching in six innovative photovoltaic solutions, has embraced concepts of Open Science to foster innovation in our sector. In this paper we mainly focus on the concept of knowledge coalitions for sharing data and know-how. We aim at assisting and encouraging our colleagues to adopt such practices that entail the performance of a more responsible research aligned with the values and needs of our era.

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Citizen science is becoming an effective approach in building a new relationship between science and society, in which the desire of citizens to participate actively in knowledge production meets the needs of researchers. A citizen science initiative dealing with the development of photovoltaics (PV) is presented. To generate a “responsible” initiative, the research question has been designed collectively from the beginning, involving diverse actors in order to encourage creativity while addressing their interests and concerns. The result has been called Generation Solar. It aims at co-creating an open database of PV installations including their technical characteristics, and an online map for visualizing them. The initiative responds to a clear scientific demand; an important drawback for researchers working on energy modelling and predictions of production lays precisely in the lack of information about these installations’ locations and characteristics. The initiative invites citizens, companies and public institutions with a PV installation to collaborate by providing such data. Data will follow the format of Open Power System Data in order to be fully exploitable by the scientific community and society. The success of the initiative will rely on the capacity to mobilize citizens and register the largest possible number of installations worldwide.