Leads for Dutch wind turbine producer based on open data

The Netherlands has an abundance of wind. Next to solar energy, wind turbines are necessary for a successful transition to a sustainable supply of electricity. Large wind turbines often have negative connotations attached to them. The engineers of EAZ. Wind – a Dutch wind turbine producer – have therefore developed a small wind turbine: the ‘EAZ-Twaalf’. Now they can make wind energy accessible on a local scale. With the length of an average tree and a natural appearance, this wind turbine fits well in the countryside and has an attractive return of around 30.000 kWh/year.

Sales data

EAZ Wind has already placed about 150 of these mills in the province of Groningen. But their ambitions are much bigger! To expand their sales activities, EAZ Wind was looking for good leads outside of their domestic market of Groningen. Readar has helped them in this goal. We did this by using the current customer database in Groningen as a basis to find similar companies in other provinces. In consideration of costs and privacy, it was decided to only use open data. By combining data of the land register, TOP10NL and BAG, a national database of farming companies could be build. The following characteristics of the interesting agricultural companies were observed:

• Developed surface property: This indicates the scale of the company, the electricity consumption and, therefore, the financial efficiency of a wind turbine.
• Construction year of most recent development: This says something about the company’s future durability and (recent) willingness to invest.

Future

The performed data analysis could be enhanced even further in a number of ways. Readar is specialized in datamining on aerial photographs and collects for example information on installed solar panels. The presence of solar panels implies that the company has invested in sustainable energy before and could therefore be more likely to invest in wind energy as well.

An estimation of the return on investment can also be made per address. In the Netherlands, the wind blows predominantly from the southwest. By making use of height data, it can be determined which companies have a ‘clear view’ towards the southwest. These are the companies where the highest return on investment can be achieved and where the business case is the strongest. That increases the conversion.

Readar also looks across borders, just like EAZ Wind. In the Netherlands, a lot of open data is available: AHN, BAG, BGT, Top10NL, the land register etc. This information is often not available in other countries. Readar obtains this kind of information from aerial photographs and builds an international database using this property information. Readar can therefore provide EAZ Wind with suitable leads in other countries.

Do you want to know more about the possibilities of data for your organization? Contact us via: contact@readar.com

Interested in a small wind turbine? Contact Timo Spijkerboer at info@eazwind.nl