PNNL

Multidisciplinary teams at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) bring together disparate fields to answer large scientific challenges. For example, PNNL’s Data Services team works to integrate across the data analytics lifecycle—from data acquisition and management, to analysis and decision support. 

The team also specializes in the development and management of a growing portfolio of data management systems. These systems allow scientific communities to share data from various institutions with other scientists who can benefit from using the data for their own research. According to the team’s leader, Chitra Sivaraman, “the goal is to leverage existing open-source pipelines to standardize and integrate datasets in near real-time and provide a platform to use machine learning-based approaches to explore, visualize, and analyze data.”

PNNL contributes to five data management systems covering a wide spectrum of research in energy efficiency and renewable energy. 

The data behind renewable energy generation

Wind and marine energy require data for forecasting, planning, and permitting purposes. For instance, the Wind Data Hub is used to collect, catalog, process, archive, and disseminate significant data from the Atmosphere to Electrons Initiative to more than 1,300+ users. It currently holds more than 220 terabytes of searchable data. 

On the Marine Energy Code Hub, users can easily browse code examples and conduct a complete text search to find software by technology type and key features. Additionally, the Marine Energy Data Pipeline processes and standardizes time series data. The pipeline provides the methods and framework needed to standardize data, conduct quality controls, compare results, model, and validate new technologies. The system reduces project costs and timelines by providing standardized tools to process data easily and reliably. 

A lesson in energy-efficient buildings 

Data from the Benchmark Datasets of Building Environmental Conditions and Occupancy Parameters system helps construction designers and engineers identify low-cost pathways to improve building operations and performance. The system currently houses nearly 27,000 files and more than 33 gigabytes with 332 users.

Moving people and products efficiently

Data management tools also progress the goal of providing an affordable, efficient, safe, and accessible transportation future where mobility is decoupled from energy consumption. 

Researchers in the Hydrogen Materials Compatibility Consortium developed a repository of data that industry and materials scientists can access for further research on the hydrogen infrastructure. The system serves as a submission point for data collected from consortium research.

The newest data management system for transportation efforts is the Livewire Data Platform. Here, data is captured at the vehicle-, traveler-, and system- levels to be included with data from urban science, connected and automated vehicles, alternative fueling infrastructure, mobility decision science, multimodal transportation, and vehicle efficiency. This newer system contains more than 4 terabytes of data thus far under 35 projects and 328 datasets and is growing. This data will be used by the Energy Efficient Mobility Systems research community to holistically benefit the transportation sector and improve the consumer experience.

Livewire is open to the public—although access to some datasets is restricted and requires permission from data owners—and it aims to disseminate data and metadata for the Energy Efficient Mobility Systems program within the Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office. “In the future, we hope to build a Data Analysis and Science Center for the research community to not only discover and access open and proprietary datasets, but also provide a platform to process, curate, and share data and codes to advance their research,” said Sivaraman. 

Researchers who want to share or access data through Livewire can contact the team at livewirecontact@lyris.pnnl.gov.