Renewables.ninja – estimate your wind and solar capacity

Renewables.ninja will help people decide if it's worth putting a renewable power source on their property.

The guesswork has been taken out of renewable energy generation with a new free resource: Renewables.ninja.

Zurich-based climate scientists Dr Stefan Pfeffinger and Dr Iain Staffell developed Renewables.ninja when they needed hourly data for their research on what wind farms and PV panels were producing across Europe.

“There are commercial providers of such data, which large project devleopers use, but they are not affordable for us academics,” Dr Pfenninger said.

“So we spent a lot of time building our own simulations and validating them by comparing them to power product data from real wind and solar plants.”

Academics and non-government organisations faced similar issues gaining access to reliable data on renewables cheaply.

They gathered publicly available data from sources such as NASA and the European centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and developed a comprehensive, predictive resource – Renewables.ninja

“It was a fortuitous combination of circumstances,” Dr Pfenninger said.

“We realised we could collaborate to get both wind and PV done and, thanks to my past experience working with web applications, I felt confident I could get a web application up and running that would let others run our simulations on demand.”

The web tool allows users to input dates and exact coordinates, or select a location on the map, then choose either wind or solar energy including the height of the turbines and the angular tilt of the panels.

Visit Renewables.ninja and have a look at your potential renewable energy output.

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