I have just come across a great new initiative called openstreetmap, a 'crowd sourcing' cooperative with a goal of generating a complete 100% publicly available global map of the earth. It does this by allowing an open architecture that allows users to upload their 'GPS tracks' and then label roads and other features on a common map data set.Why am I bringing this up? Well, it has great potential for wind energy project development and implementation - without having to rely on the privately owned data of similar GIS apps such as Google maps, Yahoo, and other proprietary map sets. Checkout the screen grab, where you can see the Danish 'Middelgrund' offshore farm just off the Harbour.
Within the tagging section you can enter data on modern wind turbine positions, and overtime this data subset can grow to be a good representation of where wind turbines are actually installed globally. Best of all the data is 100% public, which means it can be used by developers, local community groups, researchers, to generate maps for local projects free of charge!
I encourage individuals to check it out, and even think about becoming a local contributor like I now am.
4 comments:
How do you derive the position of the wind turbines? Do you take bearings from shore, or sail around them, or is there some other technique that can be used?
I'm a regular OSMer and occasionally spot wind farms off the coast, but I've not yet figured out an easy way of fixing their position.
BTW how are you tagging them? man_made=power_wind or something else?
Rajan Gupta (from Los Alamos ?) is compiling a database of power generation capacity. I've already sent him what I could find in the OSM planet.
The site's at http://openmodel.newmexicoconsortium.org/
I have just added some turbine positions from ones that I visited recently. In this case, I have parked the car under the turbine so I know pretty much where it is.
For most projects they are required to publicly release all turbine positions as part of the planning approval (especially offshore) - and then you can just manually put them in via JOSM I guess.
Any other ideas would be interesting!
"they are required to publicly release all turbine positions". That's true, but what's important to OSM is the copyright of the document you're using : If you're using a document published by the operator, it should be OK because the operator can reasonably expect his info to be compiled in a database (fair use).
A third party document will usually be copyrighted in an OSM incompatible way.
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