Project description
Automated, low-cost solutions to support wind farm development
Wind energy represents a promising renewable power source and is an essential pillar of the EU’s Energy Union vision. The emerging sector is attracting huge investments and opening new opportunities for business and employment. However, procedures for prospection and wind energy project development remain slow. The identification of the ideal site is difficult while estimates and evaluation of bankability are time-consuming. The EU-funded WindSider project will provide an automated and cost-effective solution to generate reliable wind resource data and analytics to accelerate decision-making and lower risk of new wind farm projects.
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 a 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 semi-automated process in terms of processing time and cost, while still ensuring bankable precision. 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.
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Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
1000 Bruxelles / Brussel
Belgium
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.