VoteWind.org, a collaboration between the Energy Learning Network and Open Wind Energy, is designed to support community onshore wind across the United Kingdom.
The Energy Learning Network is a collaboration between Community Energy England and the climate solutions charity Ashden, the Centre for Sustainable Energy, and leading community energy bodies in the other UK nations: Community Energy Scotland, Community Energy Wales, and Northern Ireland’s Action Renewables.
This new partnership is made possible thanks to four years of funding, totalling £1.5 million from the Climate Action Fund – a £100 million commitment from The National Lottery Community Fund to support communities across the UK to take action on climate change and involve more people in climate action.
Open Wind Energy, from the creators of WeWantWind.org, offers a fully open source approach to wind site selection so individuals and organisations save time selecting the best wind turbine sites.
How to use
Click here for VoteWind.org video demonstration
Community energy groups
Are you a community energy group that’s not listed on our map? If so, we’d love to include you! Just drop us an email at groups@votewind.org and we’ll add you to the map.
Contact us
To contact VoteWind.org, drop us an email at contact@votewind.org
Open Data
- All content on VoteWind.org is freely reusable under open licence CC BY 4.0 – please copy, edit and reuse in any way you want!
- All datasets used to create VoteWind.org are freely downloadable from https://data.openwind.energy
- You can recreate all aggregated datasets used within VoteWind.org using Open Wind Energy
- If you require the aggregated datasets sent to you, drop us an email at data@votewind.org
Methodology
The wind turbine planning constraint layers used in VoteWind.org are based on the Centre for Sustainable Energy‘s Identifying suitable areas for onshore wind development, with a reduced residential area buffer of 350m.
A full list of all datasets used, including buffer definitions, can be viewed at:
For the main planning constraint layers used within VoteWind.org, three turbine-size-specific sets of planning constraint layers were generated using the Open Wind Energy data pipeline:
- Turbine height-to-tip 100m
- Turbine height-to-tip 150m
- Turbine height-to-tip 200m
For more granular planning constraint layers – accessible when the user clicks on ‘Planning constraints’ or accesses an [area].votewind.org website, eg. scotland.votewind.org – the following turbine-height-specific sets of planning constraint layers were generated:
- Turbine height-to-tip 90m
- Turbine height-to-tip 100m
- Turbine height-to-tip 125m
- Turbine height-to-tip 150m
- Turbine height-to-tip 175m
- Turbine height-to-tip 200m
- Turbine height-to-tip 225m
- Turbine height-to-tip 250m
The exact wind turbine planning constraint layers for all layers above can be reproduced using the Open Wind Energy Data Pipeline, available at:
Full source code for the VoteWind.org frontend app (REACT + Next.js), backend app (Django + PostGIS), and mobile phone app (Unity + Google ARCore) can also be downloaded from: