Commercial wind turbine designs are usually protected and not released in the public domain by the manufacturers.

However, there are many publicly-available reference wind turbine descriptions. These are useful for carrying out simulations of turbine performance. Reference descriptions have complete details of turbine components including towers, foundations, rotors and control systems.

A collection of wind data sources in the public domain. Updated February 2025.

Met Eireann publishes its forecasts via an open API

SEM-O publishes lists of generator units (GU ids) on the Integrated Single Electricity Market.

We've all been there. You've received the PDF of a draft report, a manuscript to review or a thesis. But there are no page numbers! If you print it out, all the pages will get mixed up when you add it to the pile of paperwork on your desk. And you won't be able to cross-reference your comments to pages in the file.

Follow these instructions

The Irish Single Electricity Market Operator's website changed when the new I-SEM electricity market commenced in 2018. However, it is still possible to download historic data from the pre-2018 SEM.

Duration: 3 Years Funded at €23770 per annum from which University fees (currently €5770 per annum for EU students) are payable. Start date: Negotiable. Location: Cork, Ireland

This is a prequel to the previous post on Extracting point forecasts from TIGGE-LAM grib archives. How do you get access to the TIGGE-LAM data, and once you do have access, how do you know which data to download? The following is a short guide

We are seeking a postdoctoral research assistant to work on a new project, jointly funded by Science Foundation Ireland, the National Science Foundation of the USA, and the Department of Enterprise and Learning (Northern Ireland).

The European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) provides an archive of high-resolution forecasts generated by several limited-area numerical weather prediction models, as part of the TIGGE-LAM (The International Grand Global Ensemble - Limited Area Model) project.

The Single Electricity Market Operator for Ireland publishes a lot of useful data on its portal. You can view current and historic wholesale electricity prices, aggregate wind generation and wind forecasts, etc.

ECMWF supplies some useful command line tools for handling GRIB files: grib_get, grib_ls and grib_dump and several others. The tools are supplied as part of the latest version of the GRIB API.

I want to extract a time series of wind forecast values for a specific location from a GRIB file issued by Met Eireann as part of the MERA reanalysis project. In a previous post I listed several software tools for interrogating GRIB files. For various reasons, I wasn't able to persuade any of those tools to do what I needed.

Previous posts have discussed software tools for extracting and visualising data from GRIB archives. With some help, I've used Panoply to read and visualise surface wind speeds from the sample Met Eireann Reanalysis (MERA) data files.

GRIB is a compact binary data format, widely used for gridded climate and weather forecast data. There are two widely-used variants, GRIB1 and GRIB2. The Met Eireann MERA dataset uses the GRIB1 format. Meteorologists are very familiar with GRIB, but what is the best (i.e. easiest) way for an occasional user to extract data from GRIB files?

Met Eireann recently announced that it plans to make a high-resolution reanalysis dataset available online. The MERA dataset is based on high-resolution (2.5 km horizontal) runs of the HIRLAM numerical weather prediction model.

We are interested in solar irradiance data for simulating PV microgrids. Pierre Haessig at Supélec introduced me to the CAMS solar irradiance dataset generated by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting.

A public lecture by Prof. Myles Allen, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford.

A postdoctoral research assistant position and two funded Master's studentships are available in Extreme Weather Event attribution.

We operate a subsonic wind tunnel facility which is suitable for teaching, demonstration, and research in windflow sensing, visualisation and instrumentation.

Google map of all wind farms on island of Ireland (as of 2012).

See here for the latest list of useful resources and software packages for the Marine Renewable Energy Master's programme.

Ireland's only offshore wind farm, Airtricity's Arklow Bank I, was commissioned in 2004. Since then,  offshore wind energy has failed to progress in Irish waters, mainly due to the lack of subsidies available to operators.