alpha ventus is a pilot project for constructing the first german offshore windfarm under real open sea conditions. The three german main energy suppliers, E.ON, EWE AG and Vattenfall founded the "Deutsche Offshore-Testfeld- und Infrastruktur-GmbH & Co. KG" (DOTI) company for the construction and operation of the alpha ventus wind farm. The german Federal Ministry for the Environment is engaged with a research funding.

Situated approximately 45 kilometers to the north of Borkum in the German Bight and at a water depth of 30 meters twelve turbines will be erected: six Areva Multibrid M5000 and six REpower 5M turbines. Including the length of the rotor blades, the turbines will be about 150 meters high – almost as tall as Cologne Cathedral.

OFFIS is member of the consortium, consisting of BTC AG, Deutsche Windguard and OFFIS, which is responsible for the realisation of a control and management system for alpha ventus. Within this, OFFIS develops a data management system to handle technical and ecological data from projects that are part of the RAVE research initiative. Beside data import and archival storage, this also includes an access protected web portal, allowing accredited research partners to access data approved for them. Measuring data with a resolution of up to 50 Hz and from more than 1200 research sensors as well as operational data will be supplied into a large data warehouse system. A main challenge is to design an efficient storage concept for those high-resolution data. Because the measuring data is historically significant for further wind energy research, there are high security requirements to be met. Furthermore, conceptual long-term archiving is already considered to preserve the measuring data for future projects.