Wind Farm Analysis Business Strategy

Executive Summary

Wind Farm Site Analysis is an innovative start-up consultancy that offers layout optimization service to consumers looking for potential sites to setup wind turbines across Ireland. The solution is to predict wind speeds for particular co-ordinates by means of an analytical model which uses historical weather data collected from MET Eireann website.

Wind Farm Site Analysis will be mainly targeting the pharmaceutical companies like Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and energy suppliers such as Bord Gais who are looking to reduce their Carbon footprint in Ireland. In addition to this, there are environmentally conscious organisations: Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc. that have sought out a service provider to help them achieve their objective of a safe and sustainable environment. For example, Google recently achieved 100 percent renewable energy purchasing and is now striving to source carbon-free energy on a 24x7 basis. The partnership with DeepMind to make wind power more predictable and valuable is a concrete step toward that aspiration. While much remains to be done, this step is a meaningful one—for Google, and more importantly, for the environment. (Google, 2019) (DeepMind, 2019)

Objectives

Wind Farm Site Analysis has identified three objectives that it will pursue for the long-term success of the business:

• Proven cost-benefit analysis environmental approaches to structure building, maintenance and energy consumption.
• Become the premier environmental energy consultancy in the country within five years.
• Reach profitability within three years.

Mission

The company’s mission is to deliver best in class, innovative and intelligent analytical solution to the customers.

Keys to Success

Wind Farm Site Analysis has identified three keys to its success that will be instrumental in creating a sustainable business which will significantly increase the likelihood of success.

The second is to ensure that all of its offerings are based on economic justifications; the solution should make sense beyond the environmental considerations because it has long-term economic value.

1. Offer solutions that are based on market (customer) demand.
2. Ensure all of the offerings have economic justifications built into the respective models considering the long-term economic value.
3. Provide 100% customer satisfaction.  All customers must have their expectations exceeded.

We followed all the stages of product development as shown in Figure 1.

Marketing Research suggests that in 2018 wind energy provided 85% of Ireland’s renewable electricity and met a record 29 per cent of our electricity demand which was the second highest in Europe and the highest in onshore wind. There were 19 new windfarms were built in 2018. The record for the most wind on the all-Ireland system at any one time was broken three times. According to Dr David Connolly, CEO of IWEA, “Wind energy is an Irish success story, driving down electricity costs for consumers, cutting millions of tonnes of CO2 emissions and securing a home-grown energy future that doesn’t depend on importing fossil fuels.” (Iwea.com, 2019)

Wind Farm Site Analysis will be led by the management team of - [names and work]. Through a combination of excellent education and good work experience, company’s management team will be able to successfully execute on its business plan.

The company has consecutively forecasted sales of [] for 2 years, rising to [] in the third year. Net profit will be reached in the [second/third] year. Through a combination of a proven business model, a strong management team, and this comprehensive energy business plan to guide the organization, Green Power will be long lasting, profitable business.

Problem

Ireland is a facing a critical time in the development of a robust renewable energy strategy mainly because of its size, infrastructure, and fuel import dependency. Currently to make an entrance into the electricity network area, a lot of investigation, experimentation and analysis is required to understand the wind’s inconsistency and unpredictability. The installation layout of turbines plays a significant role in designing a wind farm. A non-ideal arrangement can prompt lower than anticipated wind power, higher maintenance costs, and so on.

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The technical hurdles to further twist entry into the wind energy sector on an island network like Ireland have identified to some extent. These issues range from concerns about low voltage and frequency control to power control. Accurate wind forecasting in fluctuating timescales will be essential for optimal planning of wind turbine setup. These issues can be addressed with a high level of technical expertise about wind generation and the associated power electronic system interfaces. But, due to lack of properly tested technologies, unreliable systems and poor resource evaluation in remote areas, majority wind energy projects report low performance, sometimes even below 60% of the predicted performance.

Researchers, scientists and other professional across the energy industry are coming up with novel ideas for how companies can capitalize and make the most of the wind power. It is therefore essential to provide robust and reliable solutions in order to mitigate the risks associated with system security and reliability.

Wind Farm Site Analysis is anxious to go along with them in exploring the technology-based machine learning strategies. With this project, we will be undergoing a deep analysis of the suitable locations for setting up the wind farms across the regions in Ireland by executing predictive analysis on historical data.

This will in a way help in addressing the pressures and concerns to meet Ireland’s energy requirements, in an environmentally and economically sustainable way while having a look at the estimated monetary development and supply demand.

Propose Solution

Wind Farm Site Analysis is a service that offers customers with precise information required to make intelligent and quick decisions regarding the layout of wind farms to understand the site feasibility and make efficient use of renewable wind energy.

As of now, there are companies providing on-site consultation in specific geographical locations, there are companies who are mainly providing services for energy monitoring and management. Wind Farm Site Analysis is a complete online analytics based solution which allows customers across the globe to get insights of any particular location. The core product comprises of a machine learning algorithm which takes the weather data and predicted wind speeds for a particular time frame as the output. The diagram below explains the workflow of the core product.

Core Product

Stage of Development

Currently the project is in its Beta phase. We continue to refine our algorithm and the use of machine learning across our wind farms has produced positive results. To date, machine learning has boosted the value of our wind energy by roughly 20 percent, compared to the baseline scenario of no time-based commitments to the grid.

Innovation

Screenshots

Future Plans (Anticipated Products & Services)

We can’t eliminate the variability of the wind, but our early results suggest that we can use machine learning to make wind power sufficiently more predictable and valuable. This approach also helps bring greater data rigor to wind farm operations, as machine learning can help wind farm operators make smarter, faster and more data-driven assessments of how their power output can meet electricity demand.

Real-time data capturing using anemometer and performing analysis on real-time data.

Market Analysis

Market Research

Target Market description and Real business opportunity if present

We carried out market research and came up with Market description, Customer Profile and charted out TAM, SAM and SOM analysis. In regards to Carbon taxes across the globe regions like North America impose a carbon tax of € 4 /metric tonne among 9 North-eastern states and € 13 / metric tonne in California State. In Europe tax on carbon dioxide emissions is at a suggested rate of €30 per tonne. Whereas in Australia Carbon tax is at € 14 per metric tonne. Because of above paradigm shift in the market, companies ranging from technological giants to manufacturing are very much inclined towards switching to renewable sources of energy.

We are targeting the companies who aim to become leaders in environmental sustainability.

Below are some of the companies which can be among our target market:

Europe -- AstraZeneca, Atlassian, Aviva, Coco-Cola.

America -- Autodesk, Bank of America, Walmart.

Australia -- KingSpan, Bank Australia, Commonwealth Bank etc.

Ireland-- Bord Gais, Sky plc and Novartis.

The companies listed in our target markets plan to reach their sustainability goals of becoming 100% renewable between 2020-2030. They are part of RE100 list, which is the list of world’s most influential companies committed to 100% renewable power. (Hemmingway, 2019)

According to a source - Ireland’s climate change advisory council has strongly recommended to increase the tax from € 20 per tonne to € 80 per tonne by 2030 to make a meaningful reduction in rising carbon emissions. (O'Sullivan, 2019)

The above scenario is the driving force for us to make our reasoning concrete to select this as our target market.

The world, including the vast multitude of corporate firms are moving towards sustainability. For example, Kingspan. Big e-commerce companies like Amazon and internet giants like Facebook and Google have huge data centres around the world consuming great amount of energy. Such companies are aiming to achieve environmental sustainability. For instance, Facebook by 2020, is planning to reduce greenhouse emissions by 75% and support their company operations with 100% renewable energy.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/02/climate/pricing-carbon-emissions.html

https://www.thejournal.ie/carbon-tax-ireland-4686471-Jun2019

Customer profile

Novartis has a huge plant in USA. In collaboration with a renewable energy company, Invenergy, Novartis aims to add 100 megawatts of wind power to the electrical grid. The 12-year agreement is expected to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by more than 220,000 metric tons per year through the issuance of renewable energy attributes. In Cork, Novartis Ringaskiddy Limited manufactures active pharmaceutical ingredients and are committed to using resources efficiently and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which affects the global climate.

https://www.novartis.com/our-company/corporate-responsibility/environmental-sustainability/climate

The established targets for Novartis is to become carbon neutral in their own operations by 2025, and then reduce our carbon footprint, including that of their supply chain, by half versus 2016 levels by 2030. These trends and interests of Novartis showcase itself as very huge potential customer. Novartis aims to become Carbon Neutral by 2025 in their operations. They also want to reduce their carbon footprint by half by 2025. To achieve these targets Novartis needs to turn to renewable sources like Wind Energy.

Sky environment strategy involves reducing carbon footprint, and to make products better and more sustainable.

Sky is the First media company to go carbon neutral in 2006. Through Power Purchase Agreements, sky aims to generate as much as possible of our own, or 'controlled' renewable energy outside our own sites.  At the moment across the UK & Ireland, sky energy is provided by either their own on-site renewable energy plants or the rest we purchase from a renewable energy tariff for which they retain the Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin.

http://re100.org/sky

Bord Gais Energy's commitment to investing in and developing wind farms because of which the company is now one of the largest generators of renewable energy in Ireland. Bord Gas wants to achieve Environment sustainability as well as become an electricity generator.

https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/bord-gais-opens-its-first-wind-farm-as-part-of-400m-plan-26845891.html

All the above customers are looking for an intelligent solution with cutting edge technology and low cost, keeping time frame in mind, so that they can meet their needs of finding a suitable site for wind energy generation. This in turn will help them in increasing the energy production to meet the current electricity demand through renewable source and thus become environmentally sustainable by 2030.

TAM: 185 Companies

SAM: 55+ companies

SOM: 3 companies

TAM

The total global usage of our product comprises of all the high energy consuming companies who are trying to turn towards renewable energy partially or fully to meet its electricity demand. The company plans to expand its customer base by targeting companies across the globe who wish to turn 100% renewable within a span of 5 years.

We specifically aim to target, RE100 companies which is the 100 most influential companies throughout the world which are committed to 100% renewable power by a specified year.

Wind Firms site constructed worldwide/Dependence in Renewable Energy.

http://there100.org/companies

SAM

The current business model uses data collected from Met Eireann which limits our customer base to Ireland. The company’s goal is to acquire and provide services to customers across Ireland.

As of 2018, the Installed Wind Energy Capacity in the Republic of Island is 3700 MW and the Installed Wind Energy Capacity in Dublin & Cork is approximately 300 MW.

In terms of Globe

3700/597000 = 0.62%

Below are some of the potential companies that Wind Farm Site Analysis will be targeting:

Bord Gais

Novartis

Sky

Energia

The Crown Estate

Kingspan

Next

SOM

Initial customers: Bord Gais, Novartis, Sky

What is the realistic Market Share that your company can have after 6 months,

1st, 2nd and 3rd year after the launch.

Market share will be influenced by your growth projections.

What is your growth projection?

There is industry standard which you can search based on the growth.

For example SaaS there is a particular industry standard which you can search for Growth.

In terms of Globe

300/597000 = 0.05%

https://wwindea.org/information-2/information/

https://windeurope.org/about-wind/statistics/

Market Trends

It’s no surprise that organizations are adopting modern analytics tools to solve business problems. An increasing number of companies report they are moving from their traditional business intelligence techniques toward more-advanced data insight products to tackle the massive surge in structured and unstructured data.

But four specific factors are driving this transformation faster than the rest, toward a business analytics market with a market size of $26.88 billion by 2021.

1. Increasing adoption of cloud,
2. Growth of advanced analytics
3. Adoption of data-driven decision-making
4. Emergence of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled technologies

https://blogs.oracle.com/analyticscloud/4-factors-driving-a-27-billion-business-analytics-market

The Irish government has set a target of meeting 40% of electricity demand from renewable sources by 2020, as part of its obligation under the EU Renewable Energy Directive to source 16% of all energy consumed in the country from renewable sources. Northern Ireland (NI) has adopted the same 40% target for electricity and so significant growth in renewables across the Single Electricity Market (SEM) of the Island of Ireland is expected in the coming years.

https://www.iwea.com/images/files/9660bd6b05ed16be59431aa0625855d5f7dca1.pdf

The vast majority of the renewable electricity requirement is expected to be met through the development of indigenous wind power as Ireland has a strong wind resource potential, with one of the best onshore wind speed averages in Europe. During 2017, 532 MW of wind capacity was installed which was recorded to be the highest level. By the end of 2017, the installed capacity of wind-generation reached 3,318 MW. The peak recorded wind-power output in 2017 was 2,444 MW, delivered on 17 February. It represented 66% of the instantaneous system demand at that point. At the time of writing, the historic peak recorded wind-power output33 was 3,080 MW, delivered on 12 December 2018, at which time wind accounted for 63% of electricity generated and 69% of the instantaneous system demand.

https://www.seai.ie/resources/publications/Renewable-Energy-in-Ireland-2019.pdf

Construction of another 2,600MW will be needed to meet the 2020 target and there is sufficient wind resource on the island of Ireland to more than double this capacity to deliver projects to export wind directly to GB. While Europe has no clear target for renewable energy after 2020 it is clear that Ireland’s development to deliver the 2020 commitment will mean the sector is well positioned to continue to grow through the 2020swith sufficient resource to meet any required renewable energy target.

https://www.iwea.com/images/files/9660bd6b05ed16be59431aa0625855d5f7dca1.pdf

Barriers to Entry

Technical Barrier

• Limited availability of infrastructure and facilities for capturing data: The wind data collection is a challenge as it involves collecting different weather parameters in different climatic conditions using sensors. If the data is inconsistent than it may lead to incorrect or irregular use of data. Initially, it’s a huge effort for setting up a system for collecting data from numerous sensors and transferring them to normalized work records. Data classification is another challenge to classify what information is relevant or not.
• Lack of operation and maintenance culture: Since renewable energy technology is comparatively new and not optimally developed, there is a lack of knowledge about operation and maintenance. Efficiency cannot be achieved if a plant is not optimally operated and if maintenance is not carried out regularly.
• Technology complexities: The techniques of advance analytics and machine learning are very complex to understand and adopt for traditional companies. The standards, procedures and guidelines in renewable energy technologies in terms of durability, reliability, performance, etc are not well defined. This prevents renewable energy from achieving large scale commercialization.

Economical Barrier

• Tough competition from fossil fuel: Fossil fuels will remain a dominant player in supplying energy. Due to falling prices and fossil fuel still emerging as a cheaper alternative to renewable energy, it is able to offer tough competition to renewable energy projects.
• High initial capital cost: Renewable energy projects require high initial capital cost of billion dollars and, because of the lower efficiency of renewable technology, the net pay back period is high, which in turn pushes investors on to the back foot. According to the article by (Dylan McConnell), Research fellow, Melbourne Energy Institute, University of Melbourne, coal supplies electricity at the rate of $40 per MWh while wind farm requires about $80-90 per MWh. While the coal cost refers to what is the actual cost of coal but wind cost is the cost over the lifetime of the project including capital and return on investment. http://theconversation.com/how-much-does-wind-energy-cost-debunking-the-myths-43710
• Intangible costs: Currently, in almost all countries, the total cost of fuel includes the cost of exploration, production, distribution and usage, but it does not include the cost of the damage it does to the environment and society. Despite severe effects on health and on the atmosphere, the unseen costs (externalities) which are connected with traditional fuels are not included in their price (Arnold, 2015). Understanding these impacts is essential for evaluating the actual cost of utilizing fossil fuels for energy generation.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6351575/#bib3

Through our flagship product Wind Farm Site Analyzer we will be overcoming some of the barriers as mentioned above related to data classification and technology. Our company primarily focus upon delivering accurate estimates of the expected wind yields at any given site in the form of visualization. As a future expansion plan the company will focus upon forecasting wind energy and power curve distribution. It is the software based on cross training models and it is self-learning & self-calibrating software system based on advanced machine learning which produces accurate wind speed predictions at a particular site. It is a complete integrated solution which can handle historic data and produce output in the form of dashboards and tabular manner. The data can be classified based on geographical regions. The parameters related to the geography are selected accordingly. The output data can be made available to the clients in any file format and can be easily integrated with the IT operations. This makes our product seamless.

Some of the key features are:

• Data flow and input validation automatically issue warnings in the event of errors
• Highly configurable browser based graphical user interface for easy access and display of all relevant information
• Performance reports to monitor and track system performance
• Data integration interfaces based on Web Services supporting numerous formats and file types (CSV, XML, SOAP, JSON etc.)

Furthermore, the product indirectly overcomes the economical barrier of high initial set up cost by offering the site feasibility solution based on strong predictive algorithm which backups the huge investment by providing the facts & figures for setting up the wind farm at a particular location.

https://www-sciencedirect-com.ucc.idm.oclc.org/science/article/pii/S0960148111000140

https://community.ieawind.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=7b6fdbfe-9b58-addf-0bc6-78c2d3f4aa5d&forceDialog=0

Competitor Analysis

Customer Value Proposition

Novartis

Mission Statement

Our ambition is to make the company both energy and climate resilient.

About

By providing Potential Wind Farm sites available near Novartis, we can provide valuable information to Novartis, regarding the most resourceful and feasible location to establish Wind Farms. Establishing wind farms for their Manufacturing operations like the Novartis Ringaskiddy (Cork), can help them reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which affect the global climate and also help them in achieving established targets for Novartis to become carbon neutral in their own operations by 2025.

Novartis along with 3 other companies have formed the Cork Lower Harbour Energy Group which aims to build multiple wind turbines around Cork.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/four-healthcare-firms-in-euro30m-wind-turbine-plan-for-harbour-129040.html

Sky plc

Mission Statement

Our environment strategy is threefold: to reduce our carbon footprint; to make our products better and more sustainable; and to use our position as a leading media and communications company to raise awareness and drive positive change on environmental issues amongst our business partners and our customers.

About

Sky environment strategy involves reducing carbon footprint, and to make products better and more sustainable. Since 2008, 47% reduction in Carbon Intensity in UK and Ireland has taken since 2008. Sky already has onsite renewable energy plants in UK and Ireland. It generated 96,017 kWh of renewable energy through Wind Turbine in 2016/17.

A provision of wind site analysis through us can help sky to accomplish their environment strategy.

https://static.skyassets.com/contentstack/assets/bltdc2476c7b6b194dd/blt5387bf8a1b47686a/59f1999e252ff1660cb6ecde/download?disposition=inline

Bord Gais

Mission Statement

Bord Gáis Networks is committed to delivering 33% energy efficiency savings by 2020 across its operations, facilities and fleet.

https://www.gasnetworks.ie/corporate/news/active-news-articles/bord-gais-networks-levera/

About

The Bord Gáis portfolio bought by Brookfield included 321MW of operational assets, a further 100MW under construction and a development portfolio of potentially 300MW.

https://www.independent.ie/business/world/canadian-energy-firm-makes-7m-on-bord-gis-wind-farm-sales-36775600.html

Pricing Model

Premium Subscription

The subscription model comprises of a 6 month paid service, where the customer is provided with dashboard solution.

Price/month - 8000 Euros

We are charging this on a monthly basis. It is recommended that customer stay for 6 months, to get accurate insights of wind site. This cost is arrived based on the Infrastructure cost of our service ( Like Laptops, Software Licenses,  etc.)

It’s a flat charge which is a consultancy fees because we are not involved with onsite consultants.

No sensors required, data capture tool or equipment.

Retaining Subscription

This comes after the 6 months, wherein customers are provided with additional features like Wind powe