WindSider

Objective:
The process of prospection and wind energy project development today is still lengthy and risky. In three out of four prospected sites no wind power plant is ever built. The main challenge is in accurately identifying a wind power sites. Today, assessing the practical constraints and estimating the potential long-term energy yield for different configurations is largely done through a sequence of manual and lengthy processing steps.

Precise estimates take time, expertise and manual effort for the different steps and a high level of quality assurance by human experts to ensure the results are sufficiently accurate to be accepted by investors and lenders, i.e. 'bankability'.

WindSider addresses the need for an automated and affordable solution for generating accurate and bankable resource maps, wind power plant designs and long-term yield assessment studies. WindSider outperforms the classical semiautomated process in terms of processing time and cost, while still ensuring bankable precision.

Expected outcome:
WindSider is a game changer enabling for the first time generation of validated reports of bankable quality. This allows for prospecting more projects faster with go/no-go decisions at lower risk than today, leading to more new wind farms. Wind energy is abundantly available as a domestic energy source all over the world. It requires no fuel and causes no emissions. It is the fasted growing source of power globally and an essential pillar of Europe’s Energy Union strategy. At the same time, the overall process of wind energy project development and power generation is far from optimized, carrying vast business opportunities for those improving it.

Between 2018-2024, the global wind energy installations on land will on average be 50 GW per year (200GW will be prospected), requiring 20,000-30,000 new turbines and investment of 70 billion EUR per year, indicating a Total Available Market size for the WindSider of approximately 2 billion EUR.

The project began January 2020 and runs until end of June 2022.

Total project budget: 16.80 mio. DKK.

Contact

Rogier Ralph Floors
Senior Researcher
DTU Wind
+45 44 80 50 90

PARTNERS

FUNDING

THE PROJECT IS FUNDED BY