Workflow Narrative

Wind Turbine Siting Analysis

Problem It Solves

Which candidate areas are most promising for wind siting at early-stage screening, and how confident are those rankings?

Who It Is For

Renewable energy siting teams and feasibility analysts.

Primary User

Wind developers, utility planning groups, and engineering consultancies.

What It Does

Creates suitability and confidence surfaces for wind siting screening.
Combines slope constraints, terrain exposure, and settlement-visibility signals.
Supports profile-based scoring behavior for speed vs quality tradeoffs.

How It Works

Derives slope and terrain-exposure factors from the DEM.
Applies distance/visibility penalties around settlement inputs.
Combines normalized factors with profile-dependent weights into siting score and confidence.
Indicative formula: score ~= w_s*terrain_suitability + w_e*exposure - w_v*visibility_penalty.

Why It Wins

Combines terrain and visibility constraints with confidence scoring to support transparent shortlist decisions.

Typical Buying Trigger

A development team needs to narrow a broad search region before expensive met mast or field campaigns.

Typical Presets

fast for broad regional pre-screening.
balanced for standard feasibility support.
quality for higher-confidence candidate ranking.

Inputs

Parameter	Optional	Description
dem, settlements	no	Terrain model and settlement features used for slope/visibility siting constraints.
visibility_radius_meters	no	Maximum visibility analysis radius used during visual-impact screening.
min_slope_degrees, max_slope_degrees	no	Slope suitability bounds used to constrain turbine placement candidates.
profile: fast \| balanced \| quality	no	Siting profile controlling screening speed versus quality/strictness of constraints.

Outputs

Parameter	Type	Description
siting_score	GeoTIFF	Core siting suitability score raster produced by the model.
confidence	GeoTIFF	Confidence layer quantifying reliability of modeled outputs.
summary	JSON	Machine-readable summary report containing run metadata, QA diagnostics, and key metrics.
html_report	HTML	Human-readable customer-facing report generated from the summary contract for stakeholder review and QA traceability.

When sweep_spec is supplied, the workflow also emits run_matrix_summary, sensitivity_report, sensitivity_report_html, and stability_map. The sensitivity report includes metrics.primary_metric, metrics.primary_relative_span, and metrics.stability_class (high, medium, low), while stability_map uses classes 3=high, 2=medium, 1=low.

Python Example

import whitebox_workflows as wbw

wbe = wbw.WbEnvironment(include_pro=True, tier="pro")

score, conf, summary = wbe.wind_turbine_siting(
    dem="data/dem.tif",
    settlements="data/settlements.gpkg",
    profile="balanced",
    output_prefix="output/wind_siting",
)

print(score)
print(conf)
print(summary)

License Notice

Use of this function requires a license for Whitebox Workflows Professional (WbW-Pro). Please visit www.whiteboxgeo.com to purchase a license.

Project Links

WbW Homepage User Manual Learn More