DOE · DOE-460 · record R3333

AskOEDI

Department of Energy · NREL - National Renewable Energy Laboratory (EE)

Overview

Development stage: DeployedSource: c) Deployed – The use case is being actively authorized or utilized to support the functions or mission of an agency.
High-impact designation: Not high-impactSource: c) Not high-impact
Impact justification: Tool is designed as an AI research assistant to help users find answers to questions about specific datasets beyond simple keyword searches. Disclaimers provided with the tool state that it should not be used for strategic decision making, nor actio
Start date: 2025-10-01 (day precision)Source: 2025-10-01T00:00:00
Withheld from public reporting: NoSource: a) No

Mission

Topic area: Energy and the Environment
Operational functions: Summarization, Search and knowledge retrieval Derived by keyword rules; see methodology

Problem the AI is intended to solve

AskOEDI serves as a virtual research assistant to OEDI users. It provides answers to a variety of user-provided questions using natural language processing and generative machine learning. Users can get answers to questions about specific datasets,

Expected benefits

Making data more accessible and user-friendly for the public.

System outputs

The systems leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation to find semantically relevent content which the AI (LLM) summarizes for the end user as a method to describe relevent content within the data catalog.

Technology

AI classification: Generative AISource: Generative AI: AI that generates new or synthetic content (e.g., images, videos, audio, text, code).
System name(s): NREL Stratus AWS Compute Environment and NREL Azure System
Custom-developed code: Yes
Public source code: Not reported

Sourcing

How it was built: Developed in-houseSource: b) Developed in-house
Vendor (as reported): AWS, Azure, OpenAI
Vendors (standardized): MicrosoftOpenAIAmazon Web Services

A vendor is the supplier named by the agency. It does not identify the underlying model or AI technology.

Data and privacy

Involves PII: No
Privacy Impact Assessment: Not reported
Authorization to Operate: Yes
Demographic features: Not reported
Training and evaluation data: As this is summarizing data from the OEDI data repository the related datasets are described by the catalog which is also used to validate the AI responses: https://data.openei.org/
Federal Data Catalog: data.openei.org ↗

Governance

0 of 8 minimum-practice questions answered. A blank answer means the agency reported nothing; it does not mean the practice is absent.

Pre-deployment testingNo answer reported

AI impact assessmentNo answer reported

Independent reviewNo answer reported

Ongoing monitoringNo answer reported

Operator trainingNo answer reported

Fail-safeNo answer reported

Appeal processNo answer reported

User and public consultationNo answer reported

Potential impacts and how they were identified

Not reported