Using collaborative virtual environments to plan wind energy installations

Countries around the world are introducing requirements to significantly increase their proportion of energy from renewable sources, such as wind. Poor siting or poor decision process will produce considerable local opposition delaying implementation and costing both proponents and the concerned public significant time, effort and stress. We propose that collaborative virtual environments have the advantage of allowing multiple involved parties to play out multiple planning scenarios and gather instant feedback in the process – ultimately with the goal of both effective energy generation and maintenance of local amenity. We have built a case study at the real wind turbine site of the Challicum Hills in Victoria, Australia. We use SIEVE (Spatial Information Exploration and Visualisation Environment) as a collaborative environment. SIEVE allows us to automatically build a virtual landscape model from the GIS data and then explore the model in 3D. Users get instant feedback about visible and audible impact (the simulation included attenuated wind turbine sounds). Edits can be performed in 3D and are saved into the GIS database. Finally, SIEVE allows collaborative planning where each participant can make and see changes and gather instant feedback on how these changes affect others (and if they meet resistance). Collaborative environments have the advantage that proposed changes are dynamic (compared to still images) and changes and feedback are directly linked (compared to an iterative planning process where planners develop plans without instant feedback).