It is foreseen that near 375 GW of wind energy will be installed in the next 5 years worldwide, being Europe, China, US and India the most growing regions. The general market trends show clearly that the wind energy sector in Europe keeps growing up. However, the wind energy sector faces serious investor confidence which hinders many wind projects from taking off. The viability, profitability and trustworthiness of any wind energy project is crucial to make the project bankable and de-risk the investment for utilities, investors, banks, greenfield developers, wind turbine manufacturers and grid operators.
The installation and the development of a wind farm is a very complex project, especially due to the natural variability of the wind which necessarily introduces uncertainties at each and every stage of a project development. In order to maximize the wind farm efficiency and ensure a high profitability, the site has to be chosen carefully, the wind resource has to be assessed with accuracy and the wind farm has to be designed and adapted to the site conditions. This overall analysis from site selection to optimization has become essential for a successful wind farm project and requires IT solutions for wind simulations and forecasts. Nevertheless, this is currently done either internally buying expensive IT licenses or externally paying for costly consulting services, and both solutions are time-consuming since running simulations could take weeks.
At Zephy-Science, we have developed a disruptive, open source wind modelling software package with a range of online analytical tools called ZephyTOOLS to help our clients in performing wind farm pre-constructions tasks, namely site prospection, wind modelling, micro-siting and energy yield assessment. These are the ZephyCFD and the ZephyWDG. We have recently made a step ahead and launched the first version of ZephyCloud, a cloud-based simulation platform that extends the possibilities of ZephyTOOLS and enables well-trained engineers to gain a significant amount of time thanks to cloud calculation and reduce dramatically the IT costs thanks to our pay-per-use model.
We would like to go a step further and make ZephyCloud the reference platform in the wind power industry by (1) building a completely new user experience based on web applications, (2) opening our advanced CFD cloud calculation engine to developers and (3) extending our toolbox ZephyTOOLS with innovative wind farm post-construction applications that will help our clients to optimize wind turbine performance and extend turbine lifetime after project construction.
