Date: Jan 30, 2013 Source: (
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Rock solid IT infrastructure allows EnergizAIR renewable energy project to expand to more countries.
Jan 29, Austin TX -- Enthought is pleased to have collaborated with the European non-profit Association for the Promotion of Renewable Energy (APERe) on the EnergizAIR project. The first phase of this project began in April 2010 and concluded in June of 2012. It is about to start phase two expanding into countries beyond the original 5. This project has a virtually unshakable IT infrastructure, developed in conjunction by Enthought and EnergizAIR.
The basic principle of the project was to utilize renewable energy indicators (in this case, photovoltaic, solar thermal, and wind energy) in an every day weather forecast for several countries in Europe. These indicators were presented as a percent of total need. Simply, how can wind and sun meet our total energy requirements for countries? The indicators give the percentage of energy needs that were covered thanks to the weather, at household (for photovoltaic and solar thermal energy) or country scale (for wind energy).
EnergizAIR's data collection, analysis and communication applications are built on a Python software architecture developed with help from Enthought consulting experts using the Enthought Python Distribution. Articulated around a scheduler which runs tasks on a regular basis, data, reports and indicators were easy to create. The scheduler uses an hdf5 back end for storing time series data and has a broker concept on top of the storage because of the multiple "read and writes" that may occur on the hdf5 file.
"When the EnergizAIR project started, we needed to develop a robust framework very quickly that we could scale later on," says Benjamin Wilkin, technical project coordinator. "Enthought delivered a really solid solution with a very easy-to-understand design written in Python. As well as being straightforward for us to extend, the framework makes it very easy for us to expand the EnergizAIR project to a new set of countries."
During phase one, each country had a national website updated daily with renewable energy indicators. 29 weather anchors were trained to properly understand and report the weather this way. The indicators were then presented via 19 media channels to reach 2.5M people across Belgium, Italy, Solvenia, Portugal and France. In June 2012, EnergizAIR received the European Sustainable Energy Award in the Communicating Category. At www.energizair.eu, you will find a widget that provides live renewable energy indicators for any website. EnergizAIR is a European project coordinated by APERe and funded by Intelligent Energy Europe. In Belgium, it is co-financed by the Walloon Region and the Brussels-Capital Region.
Founded in 2001, Enthought, Inc. is a dynamic, rapidly growing company with a mission to significantly improve the way scientific and analytic computing is accomplished by providing powerful tools and expert services for quantitative data analysis and visualization. Enthought has an exceptional customer base comprised of some of the most respected names in the financial services, oil and gas, consumer products, and technology industries. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Enthought has offices in New York City, Cambridge (United Kingdom), and Mumbai (India).
