Site Prospecting

Great renewables projects come from great sites all over the world. A well-chosen site will reward its owners many times over: through a faster development cycle, improved rates of return and excellent operational performance. A poorly-chosen site, however, will be a sink of investment and resources without any end reward.

Site prospecting is an art with many moving parts so we have designed our approaches to be as smart as possible to balance all the key tradeoffs.  In response to the challenges of wind prospecting Wind Pioneers has developed a completely novel approach to assessing the potential of a wind farm site to add a truly independent opinion during the evaluation process. We characterise perfect sites, then algorithmically scan an area for the sites closest to perfection.

Wind Pioneers’ site-finding software characterises sites according to parameters known to be present in good sites to evaluate a site’s potential. When combined with traditional approaches it creates a more reliable process for finding high-potential sites.

► What we Offer

• Clean slate nationwide prospecting studies with unrivalled detail
• Wind mapping from multiple ensembled, calibrated source maps
• Site ranking and prioritisation
• Site screening and red flag analyses
• Solar and hybrid prospecting studies, including production-pattern compatible mapping for wind-solar projects

► Perfect Wind Farms

An ideal wind farm site will have a number of characteristics from good exposure to prevailing winds, to robust grid connection options and ease of logistics and construction.

Traditional prospecting studies make overly simplified assumptions as to the weighting of criteria, arbitrarily concluding how much wind resource is worth sacrificing for, say, a closer grid connection or flat terrain for construction. We are led by wind farms. We digitised over 100,000 operational wind turbines from markets across the globe to analyse what makes a perfect wind farm?

Our analyses provide us with a recipe for our secret sauce, which can be tailored to a specific market to understand what makes for a perfect wind farm. From there we algorithmically search our area of interest for sites matching those same criteria.

• Find better sites. In an increasingly competitive market place for developers, any increase in cost of energy from finding a better site is worth its weight in gold.
• Find different sites to your competitors.Use of industry standard site finding approaches mean competing developers converge on very similar sites in similar locations, increasing risks associated with securing land and grid connectivity. Wind Pioneers’ completely independent approach is more likely to uncover high potential sites that have not been previously identified.
• Save costs on unviable sites. Measurement campaigns are expensive and time consuming and every measurement campaign that doesn’t result in a viable wind farm gives a 0% return on investment. Extra vetting of sites ensures on-the-ground costs are spent efficiently

► Unrivaled Depth of Study

Our site prospecting studies offer include consideration of 50 or more different input data sets, giving a richness and detail to the end results that are unmatched.

► Validation

Site finding is an inherently difficult process to validate due to the large number of quantitative and qualitative driversthat affect the viability of a wind farm site. To validate its methodology as far as possible Wind Pioneers’ has made an assumption is made that existing wind farms have been built in ideal places, which allows the location of operational wind farms to act as a metric to validate the approach against. This assumption has a number of weaknesses, from the practical issues surrounding wind farm land acquisition and development, to the evolving nature of wind turbine technology which will favour sites of differing characteristics. Nevertheless this assumption is considered robust enough to allow for high level validation.