The Paris conference 2015 set a path to limit climate change to "well below 2°C". To reach this goal, integrating renewable energy sources into the electrical power grid is essential but poses an enormous challenge to the existing system, demanding new conceptional approaches. In this talk, I will stress the need for data-driven approaches to understand the energy system and how I want to establish an open data base of frequency measurements.
First, I will present our latest research on power grid fluctuations and how they threaten robust grid operation. For our analysis, we collected frequency recordings from power grids in North America, Europe and Japan, noticing significant deviations from Gaussianity. We developed a coarse framework to analytically characterize the impact of arbitrary noise distributions as well as a superstatistical approach. Finally, I will sketch the steps towards an open data base and a set of statistical tools to analyze the data.