A tool for high level planning and impacts assessment of wind farms in Europe: The WIMBY interactive map and forum

Wind power deployment has experienced massive growth in the last two decades. To achieve climate mitigation goals and decarbonize our energy production much more installed capacity is necessary. However, this growth has to be in line with the minimization of the environmental and societal impacts, and requires the support and acceptance of citizens and local stakeholders. Access to information about possibilities of wind power deployment and its impacts is scattered and in many cases only available to experts in the wind power industry. To make this information available to a wider public, simplify high level assessments of wind power installations and objectivize discussions about individual projects, we have developed the WIMBY interactive map and forum. It was developed using a design thinking approach, featuring co-creation workshops with targeted end-user groups to define and prioritize the tool’s technical requirements.  Participants included 45 professionals from universities, consultancies, and NGOs, with expertise ranging from meteorology to law, including engineers, biologists, and social science experts, and 10 representatives of interested audiences (e.g. local communities, activists and landowners), specialized users (e.g. transmission system operators, consultants, wind power engineers) and education (e.g. secondary school teachers). The co-creation process involved five steps: defining the target audience, conducting user interviews to collect their needs and concerns, defining and assessing user flows, developing wireframes, and creating interactive prototypes for testing. The input of this co-creation process provides valuable information for the next step: implementation. This is executed as an iterative process with a first complete version that will be tested thoroughly and further refined. The WIMBY interactive map spans the entire European continent and offers two modes: exploratory and planning. In exploratory mode, users can visualize wind energy layers, including wind speeds, capacity factors, existing wind farms, landscape metrics, and collision risks for birds and bats. In planning mode, the tool optimizes wind turbine locations by maximizing energy output. After the locations are defined the tool calculates several associated environmental and societal impacts. A life cycle assessment provides total CO₂ emissions, while noise, shadow-flicker, land use, sea change, and job creation are estimated on the fly using open-source models.  Regulation warnings/alerts for each location are also displayed. Finally, to enable cross-exchange and direct feedback on prompted simulations, an associated online community is being developed as an open discussion forum. The WIMBY interactive map and forum goes beyond the New European Wind Atlas by also providing options to optimize locations of individual turbines and delivering comprehensive information about a wide range of potential environmental and societal impacts for hypothetical wind farms. The first functional version of the WIMBY interactive map has already been successfully tested in three pilot regions with a diverse set of stakeholders, corroborating the expectations and consolidating the design. In this poster presentation you also get the opportunity to test Version 1 of the WIMBY interactive map.