Obtaining data for wind farm development and management: The EO-WINDFARM project

The life cycle of a wind farm is a long process starting from site selection and running until decommissioning. The different steps in the process are site selection, feasibility study, design, construction, operation and monitoring, and decommissioning. All these steps are requesting data and specially geo-information.

Finding the relevant information with good accuracy for the right area is a long and costly task. In this huge task, Earth Observation (EO) satellites can help. EO sensors are designed for delivering geophysical parameters over large spatially distributed areas. In order to help the offshore and onshore wind industry to access the relevant data, the EO-WINDFARM (www.eo-windfarm.org) project is developing a single-stop shop to obtain a set of geophysical parameters.

This project is based on a consortium composed of EO service providers, wind energy market players and end-users such as electricity companies. It is supported by the European Space Agency within the Earth Observation Market Development program. The set of data comprises offshore wind, waves and tides information and onshore orography and terrain roughness maps.

In this paper, the approach chosen to select the relevant geophysical parameters, is described. It is based both on information requirements from potential end-users and consultants and on the real potential of EO satellites. Then, the data that can be accessed through the EO-WINDFARM project is described.

Perspectives of development of these EO-based services are evoked.