One of our readers, Francesco Paraggio, has gone and developed a cool wind farm locator app. It’s quite simple, but a lot of fun (if you’re a wind energy nerd like me, at least) and actually has a few neat features.
Of course, the general point is that you can find wind farms around you by using the app.
The first cool thing that jumped out to me while using the app was: “Wow, there are a lot of wind farms around here!” I knew Poland wasn’t bad with regards to wind power, and that Germany had a good number of them, but I was honestly very surprised to see how many were in this region.
All in all, there are over 12,000 wind farms on the app! It seems like the creator has done a good job tracking these down. I was also told that it’s about to be uploaded, with a lot more added soon.
One of the coolest features of the app is that it shows real-time production data for some of the wind farms. It also colors the wind farms according to size, provides capacity information, provides the wind farm names, indicates the number and model of turbines at the wind farms, indicates estimated electricity production per year for each of them, and estimates the number of homes that electricity could power. Pretty freakin’ sweet for anyone who loves wind power. (I’m sure there are a few of you here!)
Another feature of the app that’s pretty cool is that you can snap a picture and help the app find new wind farms. Given the number of wind farms on the app, I’m quite positive they don’t need much help, but you never know. On that photo section, it’s written: “Some windfarms have inaccurate positioning. Further, me miss some…. If you find one, help us to improve our service.”
Of course, the app can identify where you are, and that’s the default location. However, you can also search an address. I searched my home city of Sarasota, FL. Unfortunately, while there were still plenty of wind farms sitting on the map, there weren’t any in Florida! (Well, there is a Southern Company one off the coast on the Gulf of Mexico side, but there’s no information and there aren’t actually any offshore wind farms in the US anyway, so I’m not sure what’s up with that.)
I downloaded and used the app on my iPad Mini, but you can use it on an iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Android devices
Also, by the way, there’s a contest running right now! “Find a wind farm with inaccurate position or not in our database and take a photo from the app,” the app website states. “You can win a fantastic handheld anemometer!”
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