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Positive Energy District (PED) is recently proposed to be an integral part of a district/urban energy system with a corresponding positive influence. Thus, PED concept could become the key solution to energy system transition towards carbon neutrality. This paper intends to report and visualize the initial analytical results of existing 60 PED projects about their main characteristics, including geographical information, spatial-temporal scale, energy concepts, building archetypes, key words, finance model and challenges/barriers. As a result, a dedicated date base is developed. It is found that Norway and Italy have most PED projects so far. Many PED projects state ‘yearly’ time scale while nearly 1/3 projects have less than 0.2 km2 area in terms of spatial scale. A mixture of residential, commercial and office/social buildings are found. The most common renewable energy systems include solar energy, district heating/cooling, wind and geothermal energy. Challenges and barriers for PED related projects varies from planning stage to implementation stage. These preliminary results are expected to give useful guidance for future PED definition and proposal of ‘reference PED’. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.