FAIRWinDS: Findable, Accessible, Interpretable and Reusable Wind energy data in Data Spaces

• The cross-company evaluation of field data from the operation of wind farms offers the opportunity to identify and utilize cost savings potential.
• This is hindered not least by the lack of standardization of these data and the companies’ fear of losing control.
• In the FAIRWinDS project, the project partners are implementing the FAIR principle on the basis of a data trust model.
• As the project coordinator, Fraunhofer IWES has been assigned various roles including that of data trustee.

Wind energy will form one of the important pillars of our future energy system, which is why the lowering of the levelized cost of energy (LCoE) is of central importance. The shared use and evaluation of operational data would be an important instrument in making possible potential in wind turbine operation visible and usable.

However, at present, a cross-company learning process is failing not due to a lack of data but rather as a result of the lacking standardization of data and the companies’ fear of losing control over their respective data.

This is where the FAIRWinDS research project comes in: the aim is to enable sovereign data exchange between companies and researchers through the use of what is known as a data trust model. The trust model is implemented on the basis of the decentralized data infrastructure of the International Data Spaces (IDS). Within this distributed data space, the data trust model acts as a “data bridge” between the provider of raw data and the actors to whom the data provider intends to make data available.

The prerequisites for this include development of a distributed data infrastructure which permits secure and decentralized provision of field data from wind turbine operation. In addition, barriers to data exchange must also be broken down, for example through the implementation of standards for data formats and the use of industry standards such as IEC 61400-25 for the description of data using metadata. In addition to the technological implementation, the project also focuses on the analysis of business models in the field of data trust models. Through these and other measures, the project is working on the implementation of the FAIR principle for research data from the wind energy sector.

Fraunhofer IWES is responsible for the project coordination. In cooperation with the interdisciplinary project team from Fraunhofer IAIS, Fraunhofer IEE, Fraunhofer IMW, and Fraunhofer ISST, Fraunhofer IWES develops a trust model for the management, processing, and standardized provision of research data from the wind energy sector. In order to guarantee the practical relevance and feasibility of the developed data trust model, the project will be assisted by associated partners from industry and research.