On February 22nd, the NFDI4Energy project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), was officially launched with a kick-off event at the University of Oldenburg. The main goal of NFDI4Energy is to establish standards and infrastructures for research artifacts in energy system research to support interdisciplinary research in this field. The event brought together our partners, including Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, OFFIS Institute for Computer Science, Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), RWTH Aachen University, the Sociological Research Institute Göttingen (SOFI), the Leibniz Information Center for Science and Technology (TIB) in Hannover, and the Reiner Lemoine Institute. During the event, the tasks and objectives of the project were discussed, and the details for the first phase were specified.

The work program of the DFG project consists of seven main areas of focus. Three of these areas specifically target different stakeholders in energy system research: the research community, the public and society, and the industry. NFDI4Energy thus joins a series of research data projects within the NFDI ecosystem. NFDI stands for National Research Data Infrastructure, which aims to systematically unlock and connect valuable data from various fields of science and research, making it sustainably and qualitatively accessible for the entire German scientific system. This is necessary because research data is typically decentralized, project-specific, and only temporarily available.

The goal of the NFDI4Energy project is to establish an open and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) research ecosystem for energy systems. Specifically, the consortium will identify shared services for the research community to enable traceability, reproducibility, and transparency of research data and software. The project aims to simplify the identification, integration, and coordination of simulation-based models for energy system studies. In this sense, it promotes better collaboration and knowledge transfer between scientific research institutions, business partners, particularly in the energy industry, and our society.