This page grew out of the Wind Potentials Breakout Group Report from the Open Energy Modelling Workshop - London 2015.
Introduction
To model investment in new wind power plants, you must know where is possible to build them.
Onshore wind: must respect current land usage, nature reserves and minimum distances from properties.
Offshore wind: must respect nature reserves, sea depth, shipping lanes.
Bottom-up approach
Example for wind turbines: look at each country's rules / minimum distance regulations and look in detail at where buildings are and compute where each and every possible wind turbine could go.
Approximate approach
Use CORINE landcover and other databases of nature reserves to get a coarse-grained potential.
Land cover databases
CORINE
CORINE 2006 has European land coverage down to 100m x100m
sourced on satellite sensing (i.e. not just photos)
CORINE contains classification of land cover (agriculture, pasture, wetlands,etc) but NOT usage (i.e. natural park)
both as raster (TIF raster with geographic projection) and as vector graphics (i.e. polygons for each land coverage type)
Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF)
(possibly raw data based on satellite, not necessarily classified by type, vector or raster?)
http://glcf.umd.edu/data/
Other Land Cover databases
Global Data for land coverage: for all continents https://archive.usgs.gov/archive/sites/landcover.usgs.gov/landcoverdata.html
Land Cover Trends Dataset, 1973–2000 http://pubs.usgs.gov/ds/844/
List of GIS Metasources: https://research.csc.fi/open-gis-data
Land usage databases
For national parks (although some wind turbines do turn up here) and e.g. areas of special scientific resolution
Natura 2000 http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/natura-2/natura-2000-spatial-data/natura-2000-shapefile-1b
CDDA EU data: http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/nationally-designated-areas-national-cdda-8#tab-gis-data
Wind turbine density for different land covers/usages
Approximate figures on how densely wind turbines may be put on land, varying with land cover/usage.
Offshore resource assessment
Uk-Marine renewables atlas
Bathymetry:
http://www.gebco.net
Exclusion criteria by country/region
Many regions have specific rules about where wind turbines may be built. This list should summarise them.
Bavaria
Bavaria has a "10h rule" that wind turbines must be at least 10 times the hub height from any other buildings. This rule is being challenged in the courts.
TODO: Get the precise rule.
Existing assessments of onshore and offshore wind potentials
http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/europes-onshore-and-offshore-wind-energy-potential
