GIS was an essential tool for the author in their role developing wind farm projects at Eolectric. The author used GIS for 50% of their work, which included tasks like identifying suitable sites, evaluating wind resources, assessing environmental constraints, designing wind farm layouts including turbine and road placement, and creating maps for public permitting and internal analysis. GIS allowed the author to efficiently manage spatial data, create customized maps for different audiences and purposes, and iteratively evaluate and modify wind farm designs.
4. Work Responsibilities
• Hired in 2006 for GIS skills
• Quickly involved in wind project development
activities.
– Permitting (env. & interconnection)
– land lease & MOU negotiations
– Met. mast positioning and installation activities
– Presentations (open house, municipal council, NEC)
– Identify and select consultants
– Layout evaluation
– High level project economic evaluation
– Wind turbine evaluation & TSA evaluation and negotiation
– Establish subsidiary EDR in Mexico.
• 50% GIS and 50% project development
5. GIS responsibilities
• Work with existing database, manage
database, acquisition of data, data validation,
convert data (kmz , tiff, dwg, etc.)
• Worked on maps used for various audiences
and purposes.
• Public maps :
– Presentations
– Permitting (EA)
– Notices
– Interconnection requests (PCC)
– PPA
6. GIS responsibilities cont.
• Internal maps produced for:
– identification of greenfield sites
– factsheets
– Competition analysis
– Land securing analysis and progress reporting
– Development agreements (JDA, DA), MOU
– Environmental constraint evaluation
– Evaluate wind farm layouts (evaluate turbine position
& modify position if required, re-design and evaluate access
road, re-design and evaluate collector network, substation
positioning, emergency response time)
7. Public maps
• Presentations – open houses, municipal council
representations (label placement and text size
larger)
• General location of project, General layout of wind
farm, Constraint map. Data – 1:50k and 1:20k (NTDB
– Geobase, MERN, Municipalities, Consultants.)
• Permitting – EIA, notices in public media,
interconnection requests (Point Common Coupling
PCC), NavCan met mast installation permit, PPA etc.
8. Internal maps
• Identification of greenfield sites, meso scale wind data (200 m res. & 5
km res.) vs topography vs d(Tx) vs high level env. Constraints
• Wind resource evaluation, worked with meteorologists who perform QC
on wind data collected from our met masts and provide us with a 25m
resolution wind flow in .tiff format )
9. Internal maps cont.
• land securing progress, cadastral data
obtained from municipality or other
organisms. (polygons vs polylines)
10. Internal maps cont.
• Wind turbine positioning (wind resource vs
topography vs environmental constraints vs
economic costs)
11. Internal maps cont.
Environmental constraint evaluation, worked with consultants
and MNR data.
Types of constraints:
• Bird and bat migration routes, habitat, aerial display areas (International ,Federal,
Provincial)
• Telecommunication towers and signal pathways (Federal – CRTC)
• Maple stands several categories (Qc - UPA)
• Shadow flicker (Proponent, provincial or local)
• Archeological sites (Provincial)
• Sound (provincial regs. 40 db)
• Buildings (QC – RCI, Ont. - GEA)
• Wetlands (Convention on wetlands biodiversity)
• EFE - significant valued environment (Provincial - MNR)
• Roads (RCI)
• Rivers (Forestry regs. RNI)
• Lakes (Forestry regs. RNI)
• Railroads
• Transmission lines (utilities)
• ATV/ski doo trails, hiking trails
• Lot lines (if not in project)
12. Internal maps cont.
• Initial design and evaluate access roads (topo,
LIDAR data, slope %, vegetation removal (high res.
Images), use of road for 800 ton capacity, crane or
other vehicles. i.e. VDK 25 m wide road including
ditches, 15 – 10 m driving surface.
• Design and evaluate collector network, follow mainly
access roads, always consider shortest path (main
consideration installation cost and electrical loss)
• Substation positioning – (topo vs water features vs
location to turbines and PCC)
14. Other activities GIS can perform
• Visual simulations
• Fly by
• Complex MCE (automated design of wind
farm from several inputs)
• Thank you
• Any questions?
