Independent Consultancy - Technical Planning and Coordination

Terms of Reference: Independent Consultancy - Technical Planning and Coordination for the Open Energy Research and Analytics Consortium (ORA) Background:The Open Energy Research and Analytics Consortium (ORA) is an open energy data partnership between the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), Ember, Global Energy Monitor (GEM), Open Energy Transition (OET), and TransitionZero. Through a shared governance structure and a Secretariat currently housed at GEM, the consortium is working to build an open energy intelligence system based on trusted data, open-source tools, and collaborative analysis. ORA’s members have already developed the expertise to build every component needed for a shared open data infrastructure as well as reproducible modeling, data pipelines, versioned and citable data, quality metadata, exploration tools, and aggregate data for validation. These components have not yet been coordinated in a cohesive system, and many of the ORA organizations have built similar supporting infrastructure separately. This leaves users and partners to repeatedly reconcile definitions, identifiers, formats, and methodologies, which limits interoperability, auditability, and reuse. The growing use of AI systems for energy questions adds urgency: the standardization, versioning, and source documentation needed to integrate data across ORA are also needed to make open, verified, citable data legible to AI systems. ORA is entering a 12-month foundational phase to turn