Unveiling the Power of Open Energy Data in Switzerland: Learnings from the Energy Data Summit

What is the status of open energy data in Switzerland?

The different actors of the energy sector in Switzerland – industry, academia, and the federal, cantonal and municipal governments, –  are slowly moving towards open energy data. However,  several barriers remain to obtaining complete and reliable data.

The most significant challenge is the fact that energy data of public interest is often not publicly available and sharing it is challenging due to lack of know-how and standards, data protection issues, and a general lack of incentives. Matthias Galus, Head Geoinformation & Digital Innovation from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE), shed some light on why this might be: “We don’t have any explicit requirements or regulatory framework enforcing open energy data as to who should publish what. Also, there are no incentives for energy companies or network operators. […] Then, data protection comes in as a handy argument not to share data, without making any effort to analyze what’s actually possible.” 

The second challenge is that, “data is available, but data exchange doesn’t work so well, if at all”, as highlighted by Nicolas Lanz, head of Energy Supply in Canton Bern, and multiple other summit participants. Even when data is available, the sharing process is often inefficient and poorly organized, which implies significant efforts for the data providers. Moverer, the data itself is of inconsistent quality, resulting in high processing efforts for people using the data.

Benchmarking Switzerland against its European counterparts also highlights a notable gap in data availability and accessibility. Discussions at the summit pointed to two main factors contributing to this disparity: Switzerland has so many actors that coordination can be a challenge —there are more than 600 electricity utilities alone, all of whom lack incentives and/or mandates for data sharing. In contrast, the EU has long-standing regulations and requirements for data sharing, many stemming from their electricity market liberalization.

While still not advanced in data sharing, Switzerland has also made important progress. Here are a few examples:

• The federal administration, cantons, and municipalities are actively sharing data, for example on opendata.swiss or using their own platforms, like in Canton Bern’s energy platform. Other relevant data sources are the Building and Housing Register from the Federal office of Statistics, with information about all existing buildings and their heating type; ElCom electricity tariffs; and the SFOE’s Energy Dashboard monitoring real-time energy market data.
• Several companies are sharing data, among them: Swissgrid provides an energy overview; CKW provides smart meter data; and TNC consulting provides Swiss Energy-Charts and publishes electricity market data.
• In academia, Swiss universities have embraced the Swiss National Open Research Data Strategy, advocating for the openness of all research produced data. Researchers are publishing data on different platforms such as zenodo, Yareta from the University of Geneva, ETH Research Collection, envidat or CROSSDat, a platform with energy research data developed as a part of the  SWEET funding program from the SFOE.