Case Study: OpenEI.org achieves scalable, secure, and cost-efficient open energy data hosting with Amazon Web Services

OpenEI.org - Customer Case Study

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the U.S. Department of Energy’s primary lab for renewable-energy research, runs OpenEI.org and needed a secure, scalable platform to collect, curate, store, and share moderately sensitive research data—including a new Marine Hydrokinetic Data Repository—while meeting FISMA Moderate ATO requirements. With a small team and a mandate to make data discoverable to researchers worldwide, NREL needed agility to publish frequently updated datasets without spending undue time managing infrastructure.

NREL built a FISMA Moderate cloud environment on AWS—using services such as EC2, ELB, VPC, S3, EBS, DynamoDB, and ElastiCache—to host MHKDR, OpenEI and other research sites. The AWS-based solution enabled API-driven management, rapid site launches (in a day vs. weeks), scalable traffic handling, and native security controls that helped achieve accreditation. Results include greater data discoverability via partners like Data.gov, reduced operational effort and up to 30% cost savings on curator tasks, improved focus on data quality, and strong adoption and growth prospects.

OpenEI.org

Jon Weers

Senior Web Strategist