Sociological Research Institute Göttingen (SOFI)

Sociological Research Institute (SOFI) at the Georg August University of Göttingen

SOFI focuses on understanding the social dynamics and local conditions related to the energy transition, with particular attention to conflicts and challenges arising from energy transformation. They specialize in both qualitative and quantitative research methods and fieldwork aimed at exploring social conflicts around the energy transition, citizen preferences, and local implementation projects. SOFI’s research also addresses issues related to common goods, social places, and regional differences between urban and rural areas.

Task Areas

SOFI contributes to NFDI4Energy in the following task areas:

  • Task Area 1: Building and serving the energy research community, particularly in assessing community requirements and needs.
  • Task Area 2: Integrating society and policy in energy research, identifying social drivers and constraints for the energy transition, and understanding social acceptance, support, and opposition to the energy transformation.
  • Task Area 6: Use case “Distributed simulation for distributed energy systems”, contributing to the development of use case 6.3.

Involvement

SOFI is not listed as part of any other NFDI consortia besides NFDI4Energy.


Get in touch with the institution’s representative:

Dr. Franziska Hoffart

Sociological Research Institute (SOFI) at the Georg August University of Göttingen

Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen

RWTH Aachen University focuses on advanced control methods for power systems, distribution grid monitoring, energy flexibility management, and smart grid automation. Their expertise lies in energy management systems, data analytics, simulation methods, and high-performance computing.

Task Areas

RWTH Aachen University contributes to NFDI4Energy in the following task areas:

  • Task Area 3: Transparency and involvement of the energy-related industry, leading the development of a process to involve industry partners and collect substitute data.
  • Task Area 5: Simulation in interdisciplinary energy research, contributing to energy simulation software and methods, and extending the co-simulation framework VILLAS.
  • Task Area 6: Use case development for distributed simulation in distributed energy systems, particularly focusing on energy lab and simulation coupling.

Involvement

RWTH Aachen University is part of several other NFDI consortia, including


Get in touch with the institution’s representative:

Prof. Dr. Antonello Monti

Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen

TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology – University Library

TIB is dedicated to providing science, research, industry, and business with literature and information. As a research institution, TIB focuses on open access, open science, and the digitization of science and technology. Their work includes data science, semantic web technologies, knowledge engineering, and human-computer interaction, as well as the long-term preservation and dissemination of research data. TIB plays a key role in improving the accessibility and reuse of scientific information and data.

Task Areas

  • Task Area 4: Ensuring FAIR data for energy system research. They lead the creation of registries for data, simulators, and scenarios.
  • Task Area 7: Organization, cooperation, and engagement within NFDI and beyond.
  • PID Service: Providing terminology services for domain-specific ontologies and managing the Leibniz Data Manager for research data management in the energy sector.

Involvement

In addition to NFDI4Energy, TIB is involved in several other NFDI consortia, including


Get in touch with the institution’s representative:

Prof. Dr. Sören Auer

TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

The Institute for Information Systems (WIN) – Information & Market Engineering (IM)

The Chair of Information & Market Engineering (IM) at the Institute for Information Systems (WIN) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) conducts research and teaching at the intersection of information systems, digital technologies, and their impact on business and society.

The chair’s research focuses on Smart Grids & Energy Markets, Digital Democracy, Platforms & Digital Experiences, and Applied Responsible Artificial Intelligence. Within the energy research group, their expertise lies in market engineering, data analytics and experimental design. For example, they apply deep reinforcement learning to model and simulate energy markets and price mechanisms. They also use citizen science approaches, such as field experiments, to support sustainable and fair energy systems that actively involve public and societal stakeholders.

In NFDI4Energy, WIN contributes its expertise in incentive and platform design, digital citizen science, and Design Thinking. The goal is to support both the feature design of services within the NFDI4Energy portfolio and the engagement of the broader public.

Moreover, WIN maintains a long-standing network of municipal utilities and energy companies, which plays a key role in engaging the energy industry in NFDI4Energy activities.

Task areas

The WIN is involved in the following task areas:

  • Task Area 1: WIN’s work in this TA involves the monitoring of the service usage as well as the development, implementation and evaluation of feedback & incentive mechanisms to enhance researcher‘s participation and engagement.
  • Task Area 2: In this TA, WIN works on integrating society and policy in energy research, including the support of actors who bridge the gap between scientific data and public or political audiences, such as data journalists.
  • Task Area 3: In this TA, WIN facilitates the involvement of the energy-related industry by identifying of industry requirements and developing data strategy guidelines for platform adoption and data sharing. These activities are carried out through workshops, surveys, and interviews within our extensive industry network.

Involvement

KIT-WIN is not part of any other NFDI consortia besides NFDI4Energy.


The Institute for Automation and Applied Informatics (IAI)

The IAI conducts research and development on automation, information, and communication technologies for sustainable energy systems and complex infrastructures. It focuses on interdisciplinary, application-oriented research in information, automation, and systems technologies. Their work supports the development of future-proof energy systems and complex industrial and laboratory processes. The area of energy informatics integrates informatics, electrical engineering, cybernetics, and economics to address challenges in complex energy systems.

The research group focuses on the modeling, simulation, and analysis of power grids, as well as distributed control and optimization. Its work also includes energy systems analysis, such as building energy supply and the integration of heat and electricity. Further key topics are semantic data models for spatial and energy data, data management covering time series, metadata, and smart retrieval. The group’s Energy Lab serves as a platform for studying interactions in future energy systems, including the Smart Energy concept.

The IAI brings deep expertise into NFDI4Energy in the areas of Metadata, Data Management, Ontologies, and Metadata Standards to support cutting-edge research and innovation

The Energy Lab at KIT is one of Europe’s largest and most advanced research infrastructures for renewable energy systems. It serves as a testbed for future energy technologies, enabling real-world experimentation and simulation of complex energy systems. The Energy Lab serves as a testbed in NFDI4Energy for the methods and tools developed within the project.

Task Areas

The IAI is involved in the following Task Areas:

  • TA4 and TA5: IAI´s work in these TAs involves the development and adaptation of a metadata standard for energy data and the development of an ontology for linking simulators in the energy field.
  • TA6: In this TA, the IAI develops a use-case to demonstrate the achievements of Task Areas 4 and 5 on the semantic modeling of co-simulation scenarios. We create a Power-Hardware-in-the-Loop Co-Simulation using the available Hardware in the EnergyLab and verify that this can properly be described with the mentioned models.

KIT is involved in a large number of consortia, but IAI is not part of any other NFDI consortium. It is, however, well-connected within the community through its participation in the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC).

Involvement

KIT is involved in a large number of consortia, but IAI is not part of any other NFDI consortium, but is very well connected within the community through its participation in the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC).


Get in touch with the institution’s KgS-representative:

Prof. Dr. Christof Weinhardt

Karlsuhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)

The Chair for Computer Networks and Communication Systems (CS7)

The CS7 research group at FAU focuses on the development of network protocols and architectures, analyzing and evaluating them through modeling, simulation, measurement, and testing. They specialize in quality-of-service (QoS) for ICT in energy systems, smart energy systems, and connected mobility. FAU CS7’s expertise includes agent-based simulation, co-simulation for energy systems, and flexibility modeling within smart energy.

Task Areas

FAU CS7 contributes to NFDI4Energy in the following task areas:

  • TA5: Simulation in interdisciplinary research, leading efforts in simulation middleware for the energy domain, and extending the existing topic-based publish-subscribe framework.
  • TA6: Use cases for community services, including conducting communication network simulation and implementing aggregation-based management of flexibility in distributed energy systems.

Involvement

FAU CS7 is not part of any other NFDI consortia besides NFDI4Energy.


The Chair for Sustainability Transition Policy

The Chair of Sustainability Transition Policy examines policies for transitioning to a climate-neutral future. It stands for interdisciplinary and empirical research, drawing from different backgrounds including transition studies, political science, economics, and other social sciences. We also bring this perspective to the consortium, where they focus on the ways that NFDI4Energy can support stronger empirical research on climate policies: by enabling energy models to include political and societal factors, and providing research data infrastructure, including datasets, methods, and an ontology for structuring climate policy data to improve interoperability.

Task Areas

The Chair of Sustainability Transition Policy is involved in providing structured data about climate and energy policies in the following Task Areas:

  • TA2: Within TA2, they dedicate substantial effort to analyzing policy documents. For their Climate Policy Atlas, they provide data and methods for recording information on policies in a machine-readable and granular way – a resource that is currently unavailable to researchers. For instance, they not only capture whether France had a feed-in tariff for electricity in 2012, but also the level of policy support for different installation sizes, regulations regarding eligibility, and further details. Their datasets to date include policy support for renewables and electric vehicles, regulations defining where specific infrastructures may be built, and national climate and renewable energy targets. They are also investigating the policy logics underlying different policy approaches and how these connect to broader attitudes towards sustainability transitions.
  • TA4: To support this work and enable other researchers to consistently map policies and their interrelations, the Chair is developing the Climate and Energy Policy Ontology (CEPO) as part of TA4. A large team contributes to these efforts, including three postdoctoral researchers, two doctoral researchers, and several master’s students engaged in data collection.

Involvement

Transition Policy is not part of any other NFDI consortia besides NFDI4Energy


Get in touch with the institution’s KgS-representative:

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Reinhard German

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg

The Department of Sustainable Systems Engineering (INATECH) at the University of Freiburg focuses on solutions for sustainable development, with a particular emphasis on energy systems, sustainable materials, and resilience. UFR-INATECH’s research group on Control and Integration of Grids, led by Professor Anke Weidlich, investigates the integration of energy systems and the dynamic interaction of grids and markets, while considering both technical and socio-political factors. Their work contributes to energy system and market modeling, flexibility assessment, and long-term energy scenarios.

Task Areas

UFR-INATECH is involved in several key task areas within NFDI4Energy:

  • TA2: Evaluation and further development of energy system models, incorporating social and political factors.
  • TA4: Extension and application of frameworks for scenario presentations.
  • TA5: Creation of an overview and ontology for energy simulation software.
  • TA6: Management and leadership of the task area for long-term energy system scenarios.

In addition to their role in NFDI4Energy, UFR-INATECH is also involved in several other NFDI consortia, including DataPlant, NFDI4BIOIMAGE, DAPHNE4NFDI, NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Health, NFDI4ing, NFDI-MatWerk, PUNCH4NFDI, and Text+.

Involvement

In addition to their role in NFDI4Energy, UFR-INATECH is also involved in several other NFDI consortia, including


Get in touch with the institution’s representative:

Prof. Dr. Anke Weidlich

Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg