Irish company BrightWind has announced the launch of BrightHub, a new wind and solar resource data management platform for the renewables industry.
The system is an online platform designed to reduce the time and costs associated with wind and solar resource data management by arranging all of a renewable energy developer’s resource information in one place.
The launch marks the completion of a project supported by a €390,000 grant awarded to BrightWind by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland in 2022.
Resource data in the renewables industry is notoriously unstructured, and it can take days or even longer for a wind analyst to figure out what the data actually means, said BrightWind.
To address this, the company developed a structure to capture all possible permutations for a mast. Following the open sourcing of this model it became the basis for the development of the International Energy Agency (IEA) Wind Task 43 wind resource assessment (WRA) data model, resulting in an internationally recognised standard to describe how a measurement station is configured.
Storing information in this standardised format serves as a foundational element for automated data analysis.
“When I started my journey with IEA Wind Task 43, the whole conversation revolved around leveraging machine learning and AI to automate wind analysis,” said BrightWind director Stephen Holleran.
“I made the point that without a standard data format, none of that automation is possible,” he added.
“The development of the WRA Data Model, on which we built BrightHub, makes AI possible for wind analysis and represents a step change in how wind analysis will be done in the future.”
BrightWind director Shane Martin said: “As wind analysts, we know first-hand how hard it can be to understand how a given measurement station was configured and maintained during its lifetime.
“BrightHub provides a repository for these configurations stored in the WRA Data Model format, allowing analysts immediate and frictionless access to the data in a meaningful way.”
In addition to providing a secure repository for proprietary data, the new platform also provides access to a growing number of publicly available datasets in the same standard format, all of which can be accessed via a GIS style interface.
BrightHub is the latest development in the digitalisation of resource assessment and follows in the footsteps of BrightWind’s open-source Python library for the automation of wind data analysis, which was released in 2019.
The system can be accessed via www.brighthub.io and documentation of the BrightWind library can be found on its GitHub repository at https://github.com/brightwind-dev/brightwind.
BrightHub has been supported with financial contribution from Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland under the SEAI Research, Development & Demonstration Funding programme 2021, Grant number 21/RDD/606.