Pioneers of data transparency

This report identifies best practices in power sector data transparency across Asia and Oceania, highlighting New Zealand, Australia, and India as leaders. It details the technical requirements for high-quality data—such as hourly granularity, real-time publishing, and unit-level geographical detail—and provides a case study on the public-private partnership between India's NITI Aayog and the Vasudha Foundation to create a centralized energy data platform.

• New Zealand, Australia, and India are identified as economies with excellent scores on data transparency. Australia and New Zealand specifically exceed standard hourly data sharing by publishing real-time data through public dashboards every five minutes.
• High-quality data transparency is characterized by specific technical standards: publishing lag of real-time or next-day availability, geographical granularity at the unit-level, and detailed fuel breakdowns. Australia, New Zealand, and India all publish data at the unit-level, while Australia and New Zealand are the only economies with functioning public APIs.
• In India, the government agency NITI Aayog partnered with the non-profit Vasudha Foundation to aggregate power sector data across 28 states and eight union territories. This partnership aims to create the India Climate and Energy Dashboard (ICED), a single-window access platform for climate and energy datasets, planned for launch in the first quarter of the financial year 2024.
• The Vasudha Foundation encountered significant technical hurdles in India, including data provided as non-machine-readable PDFs or scanned images from 68 distribution companies, inconsistent time lags, and a lack of unique identifiers for power plants. The foundation emphasizes that building granular demand-side data is now a top priority to maintain grid stability as intermittent renewables increase.
• The report recommends several low-barrier open data policies, including the use of machine-readable formats (xlsx, csv, json) instead of PDF, the removal of access restrictions, the adoption of open data licenses, and the implementation of non-proprietary unique identifiers to ensure data interoperability.

APA

Ember (2023). Pioneers of data transparency. https://ember-energy.org/chapter/pioneers-of-data-transparency/

Chicago

Ember. Pioneers of data transparency. 2023. https://ember-energy.org/chapter/pioneers-of-data-transparency/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Ember |title=Pioneers of data transparency |date=4 May 2023 |url=https://ember-energy.org/chapter/pioneers-of-data-transparency/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{ember2023pioneers, author = {{Ember}}, title = {{Pioneers of data transparency}}, institution = {Ember}, year = {2023}, month = may, url = {https://ember-energy.org/chapter/pioneers-of-data-transparency/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }