Data Warehousing for Distributed Offshore Research at Alpha Ventus Overview and Insights gained

Abstract

alpha ventus is the pilot project to build the first German offshore wind farm under real sea conditions. The project started in 2007 under the promotion of the Deutsche Offshore-Testfeld- und Infrastruktur- GmbH & Co. KG (DOTI), a joint organization founded by the three major German energy companies E.ON, EWE AG and Vattenfall, and partially funded by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU). The project is accompanied by several research projects that are organized in the Research at Alpha Ventus (RAVE) initiative2. For these projects, a data warehouse is used to store, archive, and provide access to the technical and environmental high-resolution data that the alpha ventus wind farm generates. Daily, the alpha ventus wind farm collects 5 billion sensor values. Since its initial launch in April 2010, the data volume stored in the alpha ventus data warehouse has reached 14 terabytes and is growing by additional 6 terabytes per year. Thereby, the main challenge is twofold: to process large amounts of data to provide convenient accesss to the data warehouse to research groups and to meet the security requirements imposed by the two involved wind generator manufacturers. In this contribution, we present an overview on the architecture of the Wind Energy Data warehouse for Alpha ventus (WEDA), present information on the use of the WEDA system, and share our insights gained from the past years of operation.