Hi everyone, my name's Chris Garrity with the USGS Energy Resources Program and I'm
here to give you a sneak peak at Windfarm.
Windfarm is a web mapping application that supports the newly released National Turbine
Database.
Windfarm interacts with this database and even lets users run GIS-like applications
without the need for GIS.
All you need is a web browser and an Internet connection.
Let's take a more detailed look at the database.
The database contains more than 47,000 unique records.
Each record was attributed and locationally verified.
As I zoom in, we can start to see these wind fields start to take shape.
Continued zooming reveals the wind turbines in the high-resolution satellite base.
Information about any one of these points can be accessed by simply clicking on the
point.
At that point, a pop-up is revealed and it shows things like the site name, capacity,
blade length, and the total height of the structure.
Navigation through this site couldn't be easier.
If, for example, I knew that there was a wind farm north of Palm Springs, CA, I could use
my location tool, type in Palm Springs, then instantly zoom to that area.
The location tool also supports things like street addresses, lat/lon coordinates, zip
codes, or even informal names, like Disneyworld, for example.
The viewer lets users search the database.
So, for example, if I knew my site name, I could type that name in the search utility
and it will return for me the number of turbine that are in that field.
For the casual user who doesn't necessarily know the site name, the search tool can be
useful in other ways.
Let's say, for example, that I want to determine how many wind turbine sites are powering or
help to power high schools, I can type "high school" into my search, and, in this case,
seven sites fit that critera.
Another example, let's say I know my local Walmart has a turbine in the backyard helping
them power the facility.
If I wanted to get more information about that turbine, I could simply type in Walmart,
and then click on that point to get the additional information about that Walmart site.
The viewer also has some GIS-like capabilities that let the user interact a little more with
the data.
Let me go ahead and zoom in here in Southern California to show you what I mean.
I swapped out the satellite base with a more neutral base to highlight the thematic data.
So, let's say I wanted to style these data points based on their power-generating capacity.
With the filter-data tool, I can do that.
My cooler colors, my blues and yellows, are lower-capacity units, where my hotter color
units—the reds—are the higher-capacity units.
These grays are guys we don't have any information for; I can turn those guys off and eliminate
them from the view.
So if I wanted to, for example, filter out all the turbines in the Nation that had capacity
greater than 2.5 MW, I can use my sliders to do just that.
I can do the same thing with other attributes like total height.
I can say, show me everything, every turbine with height greater 110 meters.
I can even use these sliders in conjunction to run advanced filters.
So, I can say, show me turbines with capacity greater than 1 MW but less than 3MW, a height
greater than 365 meters, with a blade length greater than 40 meters.
So you can see, I've really filtered down my dataset.
This is just some functionality available through the application.
We invite you to check out the application and download our web services for integration
with your own systems at the link below.