2025 | Excellent | Germany | Government Employees | SDG11 | SDG13 | SDG7
Automated Detection of Wind Turbines Using High-Resolution Satellite Imagery

Organisation Name

AI-Lab at the German Environment Agency

Industry

Public service

Organisation Website

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/digitalisation/the-ai-lab-at-the-german-environment-agency

Country

Germany

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy

SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

SDG 13: Climate Action

General Description of the AI tool

The rapid growth of renewable energy sources presents challenges in balancing energy development with competing interests, highlighting the need for accurate and up-to-date spatial data for effective management and compliance. Therefore, we developed an AI tool that automatically detects wind turbine locations in Germany using satellite imagery, improving the accuracy of manual registers. Our Remote Sensing Pipeline incorporates a YOLO (You Only Look Once) model inferencing on high-resolution (4.77m) PlanetScope satellite imagery, achieving a 97% detection rate.

Github, open data repository

https://zenodo.org/records/15835057

Relevant Research and Publications

1. Dataset – https://zenodo.org/records/14627853
2. Model – https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics
3. Dataset – https://www.marktstammdatenregister.de/MaStR/Datendownload

Needs

Funding

CONTACT

International Research Centre
on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI)
under the auspices of UNESCO 

Jožef Stefan Institute
Jamova cesta 39
SI-1000 Ljubljana

info@ircai.org
ircai.org

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