Applying FAIR principles throughout a multi-sector, multi-scale effort to provide electricity capacity expansion suitability data as a service to the scientific community.

Abstract:

Determining suitable areas to accommodate future electricity capacity expansion requires a multitude of datasets that encompass a variety of sectors, scales, and formats. As an exercise in implementing FAIR guiding principles, we amalgamate, archive, and distribute these data into a commonly used format, to provide to the scientific community as a reusable service. We describe the entire process of planning, discovery, harvesting, documenting, archiving, publishing, and serving data for the Capacity Expansion Regional Feasibility (CERF) model. CERF uses electricity capacity expansion suitability data to determine feasible and cost-effective siting options for power plants within the contiguous United States at a 1km resolution. These data address both common and technology-specific areas where power plants (non-renewable and renewable) may be sited. The data format enables localized usage, so that other researchers can implement their own data in the same common format. Both the CERF model and the supporting suitability data are open-source and publicly available to the scientific community.