Funding Opportunity: Orange Button (SB-DATA)
SunShot Subprogram: Soft Costs
Location: Santa Clara, CA
Amount Awarded: $1,638,765
Awardee Cost Share: $1,820,468

The SunSpec Alliance team will establish an open, easy-to-adopt solar data exchange architecture and standards that enable the free flow of data between existing software products across the solar life cycle. It will be comprised of uniform data taxonomy, information models, data schemas, data exchange protocols, and a compliance test suite and reference software. This system will leverage the capabilities of existing international standards, extend them using uniform data taxonomies built with industry consensus, and combine them with common data exchange technologies.

APPROACH

Through technical working groups, the SunSpec Alliance will establish, publish, and manage open data standards around key industry activities such as financing, insurance, and grid operation. The project will also provide technical assistance to stakeholders working to implement those standards. This approach will establish a unified method for the interchange of interoperable datasets created throughout the solar project lifecycle.

INNOVATION

This project will help to create standards for an open and royalty-free solar data exchange system that will be adopted by more than 60% of solar stakeholders in multiple market segments. By doing so, this will reduce the soft costs across a solar project lifecycle to a range of 15 to 23 cents per watt.