About
This dashboard is a personal project I've developed to help visualize Ireland's wind energy production across the county. Ireland is making significant efforts it's in renewable energy goals and the aim of this web applications is to provide insight into the performance of the wind farms on our island. The values produced here are only estimations, which are explained below, and this dashbord only serves as a visualisation tool to better highlight wind energy in Ireland.
Please feel free to reach out to me with any suggestions or comments on my LinkedIn (Taron Wright).
The wind farm energy production values are only estimations and not exact measurement values. There is no data availability on real-time energy production of wind farms in Ireland. The method used to calculate these estimations is as follows:
$$P_w = N_t \frac{1}{2}\rho A v^3$$
where $$ P_w$$ is the wind farm power, $$ N_t$$ is the number of turbines on the windfarm, $$ \rho$$ is the denisty of air, $$A$$ is the turbine swept area and $$ v$$ is the wind speed.
The wind flow field for the map is produced using Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW). This is an interpolation method that estimates values by using weighted averages of sampled data. The closer the sampeld data is to the value being interpolated the greater influence it has on it :
$$\hat{\Zeta} = \frac{\sum_{i=1}^n \frac{\Zeta_i}{d^k_i}}{\sum_{i=1}^n \frac{1}{d^k_i}}$$
where $$ \hat{\Zeta} $$ is the interpolated wind vector, $$ \Zeta_i $$ is the known sampled wind vector, $$ d_i$$ is the distance from the sampled wind vector to the interpolated wind vector, $$k$$ is the power parameter for weighting and $$ n$$ is the number of sampled points to use.
This interpolation method is used to calculate the wind vectors for the flow field. Wind speed values and directions are sampled at every wind farm location across the county and these values are then used to interpolate the vector field across the whole country.
The tools and libraries used to create this project:
- Flask - the lightweight python web framework.
- Leafletjs - a lightweight javascript libary used for the map, clusters, icons and choropleth layer.
- Leaflet-velocity - a plugin for Leaflet to create a canvas visualisation layer for direction and intensity of arbitrary velocities.
- Chartjs - a javascript charting library for the web.
- Driverjs - a lightweight javascript library to drive user's focus across the web page.
This project was heavily influenced and inspired by some fantastic projects that beautifully visualize wind flow:
The weather data is obtained from the Met Eireann API:
- Copyright Met Éireann
- Source met.ie
- This data is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
- Met Éireann does not accept any liability whatsoever for any error or omission in the data, their availability, or for any loss or damage arising from their use.
- This material has been modified from the original values.
The wind farm data is obtained from the various sources listed below:
