Promoting citizen science in the energy sector: Generation Solar, an open database of small-scale solar photovoltaic installations

Abstract

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.

Open energy system modelling to support the European Green Deal

“…These are reasons why there is a paradigm shift towards open methods in energy modelling projects ( Morrison, 2018 ), as also reflected in the contributions of this special collection. It presents new open datasets ( Sterl et al , 2022 ) and new methods for citizen-driven data collection ( del Cañizo et al , 2021 ) as well as a better processing of open data sets ( Fleischer, 2022 ) to increase the use of open data in modelling. Additionally, the collection presents a new tool for the analysis and visualisation of results ( Huppmann et al , 2022 ) to streamline the postprocessing pipeline.…”

“…Citizen science has gained increasing relevance in bringing science and society closer together. del Cañizo et al (2021) present a case study of the citizen science initiative “Generation Solar”. The aim of the initiative is to co-create an open database of PV installations, including their technical characteristics, and an online map to visualise the locations.…”