DTU's wind atlas gets global breakthrough

Since its launch in 2015 The Global Wind Atlas developed at DTU has become a data source and calculation tool for wind energy around the world. Visitor numbers have grown steadily over the years, with an average of 50,000 unique users visiting the wind atlas every month in 2024. Users come from a total of 236 countries and territories, and they use the wind atlas for site feasibility studies for both onshore and offshore wind energy projects.

"The transition to green energy has created great interest in The Global Wind Atlas. We are continuously working to develop new and better modeling to ensure higher accuracy in the assessment of wind resources. One of the ways we do this is by calculating data at meteorological microscale, with 250 meters between each calculation point," says Jake Badger, section leader at DTU Wind, Department of Wind and Energy Systems.

Calculations for offshore wind farms

The Global Wind Atlas is a free, web-based data display and calculation tool that has been expanded over the years with a number of new datasets and features. The primary datasets include mean wind speeds and wind power densities, data on ocean water depth, surface roughness and height above sea level. Most recently, in May 2024, DTU included data for the electricity transmission grids to which wind turbines and wind farms could possibly be connected.

Currently, most visitors, who are likely to be working on wind farm feasibility studies and planning, come from Germany, USA, UK, Spain and India. To encourage even more use of the Global Wind Atlas, it is now available in all six official UN languages; having been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish and the original English language.

Wind atlas as software

In addition to the global wind atlas, DTU Wind offers research-based guidance on modeling wind conditions and analyzing wind measurements used to develop wind energy projects. The calculation models used in The Global Wind Atlas are also available in DTU's software WAsP (Wind Atlas Analysis and Application Program). The department also offers courses in using the WAsP software for planners and developers of wind energy projects. DTU Wind has sold more than 7,000 WAsP licenses and 250 consultants are certified to use WAsP worldwide.

Jake Badger points out that in the coming years, large-scale planning and scaling up of wind farms and wind farm clusters will be met with demands for consideration of overall environmental impact and holistic design. DTU Wind is therefore working to connect several disciplines in the models' analysis of environmental impact, climate change effects, value of energy and Power-to-X energy optimization.