With that kind of modeling detail, the Vestas engineers needed to improve the model even further, and the best way to do that was to add data. And that's what Christensen's team did: they planned to increase the wind library tenfold with more weather data over a longer period of time.

So now the IT challenge was significant, because Vestas not only had to accept and store all of the incoming data, it had to be able to analyze that data and all of the historical facts in a timely manner. Initially, that was hard to do. Vestas would have to wait up to three weeks whenever they ran a potential site report.

"In our development strategy, we see growing our library in the range of 18 to 24 petabytes of data," Christensen said. "And while it's fairly easy to build that library, we needed to make sure that we could gain knowledge from that data."

Big data for big wind

Ultimately, Vestas decided to turn to IBM for help. Big Blue's software, IBM's Hadoop-based big data solution, turned out to be exactly what Vestas needed.