Data methodology

Useful data begins with visible evidence.

Our job is not to hide the public sources. It is to make them cleaner, connected, historical and easier to interrogate.

01

What the current beta contains

The live application is built from the July 2026 Renewable Energy Planning Database snapshot published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. It contains all 2,858 rows whose technology is recorded as Wind Onshore or Wind Offshore.

Source-complete, enrichment-incomplete

The beta is complete for wind rows in this REPD snapshot. It is not yet enriched with Companies House ownership, NESO grid records or reviewed Elexon generation mappings.

02

Source hierarchy

When sources disagree, we do not silently choose the most convenient value. We retain the evidence, source date and observation date, then apply a documented confidence rule.

  1. Official registersDESNZ, Elexon, NESO, LCCC and planning authorities.
  2. Project evidenceDeveloper publications, consent documents and statutory filings.
  3. Manufacturer evidenceOfficial turbine specifications and product documentation.
  4. Derived metricsCalculations made from explicitly identified source values.
03

Normalisation and identity

Source values are preserved, then normalised into consistent types. Dates use ISO format internally. Capacity remains in MW. British National Grid coordinates are converted to WGS84 for mapping; Northern Ireland uses the Irish Grid transformation.

Project names become stable, unique URLs. A missing project name is not dropped: the source reference is used as an explicit placeholder. Company labels are currently grouped exactly as published and are not yet treated as verified legal entities.

04

Confidence and measurement

Official

Copied or normalised from an authoritative register.

Verified

Matched across two or more credible sources.

Estimated

Calculated using a published, reproducible method.

Unavailable

No defensible value has been established.

Generation and capacity factor remain unavailable until a project has a human-reviewed BM-unit mapping. The product will never present an estimate as measured output.

05

Refresh and change history

REPD is scheduled for quarterly ingestion. The July 2026 snapshot is the baseline. Future imports will create field-level changes for material values including capacity, turbine count, status, company roles and milestone dates.

Never overwrite history silently Keep source and observation dates Review ambiguous entity matches
06

Licensing and attribution

Open Government Licence v3.0

Current REPD-derived pages contain public sector information licensed under the OGL v3.0. Future sources will be tracked separately with their attribution and redistribution conditions.

OpenStreetMap-derived data is not currently mixed into the project database. The map baselayer has its own visible attribution. Bulk exports will remain disabled until each included source has passed a product-specific licensing review.