The dirty secret of wind energy simulations
Here is something that everyone in wind energy knows but nobody talks about: the most powerful simulation tools in the industry are barely usable.
OpenFAST — the aeroelastic simulation engine developed by NREL — is the gold standard for wind turbine design and load analysis. It is peer-reviewed, open-source, and used by every major turbine OEM, consultancy, and research lab in the world. It is also, by any modern standard, a nightmare to operate at scale.
Running a single simulation means writing dozens of input files by hand. Running a full IEC certification campaign — whether onshore (61400-1) or offshore (61400-3-1, 61400-3-2) — means orchestrating hundreds of those simulations across turbulent wind seeds, design load cases, and operational conditions. It means writing custom scripts to generate TurbSim wind fields and HydroDyn wave kinematics from metocean data, managing directory trees that grow to thousands of folders, babysitting jobs on HPC clusters, and then writing more scripts to extract, aggregate, and format the results.
This is not engineering. This is infrastructure management dressed up as engineering.
And if you are a consultancy serving multiple clients, multiply that overhead by every project on your desk. If you are an educator, imagine asking a student to learn fluid-structure interaction physics while also debugging Fortran compilation errors and shell scripts.
We built TurbineX because we believe the workflow — not the physics — is what is holding the industry back.
The real bottleneck is not compute. It is workflow.
Wind energy has no shortage of computational power. Cloud computing is cheap, getting cheaper, and available on demand. What the industry lacks is a coherent workflow layer that connects turbine design to simulation execution to engineering analysis — without requiring every team to build and maintain their own bespoke pipeline.
Today, a typical load analysis workflow looks like this:
- An engineer manually prepares OpenFAST input files, often by copying and editing a previous project's directory.
- A separate set of scripts generates TurbSim wind fields for each load case and seed combination. For offshore projects, another set of scripts defines wave and current conditions from metocean data — irregular sea states, wave spectra, current profiles — and feeds them into HydroDyn.
- Someone writes a batch submission script for the team's HPC cluster or local workstation.
- Jobs run. Some fail silently. Someone checks logs, reruns the failures, and waits.
- Another set of post-processing scripts extracts time series, computes statistics, runs rainflow counting for fatigue, ranks extreme loads across all DLCs.
- Results get copied into spreadsheets, then into Word documents, then into PDFs for the client or the certifier.
Every single step in this chain is a potential failure point. Every team has its own homegrown version of this pipeline. No two are alike. None are auditable in the way that a certification body would ideally want. And none of them travel well — when an engineer leaves, their scripts often leave with them.
TurbineX replaces this entire chain with a single platform.
What TurbineX actually does
TurbineX is a wind energy analysis platform built on world-class research solvers — OpenFAST, FAST.Farm, and TurbSim. It does not replace the physics engines; they remain the solvers, and every simulation is fully transparent and reproducible. What TurbineX adds is the engineering layer that turns them into a complete analysis environment — IEC certification logic, automated wind field generation, input validation, fatigue analysis, and structured results delivery.
The workflow is four steps:
Upload. Drop in your existing OpenFAST input files as a ZIP bundle, or configure a turbine from scratch using our visual editor. We support the NREL 5 MW, IEA 15 MW, and IEA 22 MW reference turbines out of the box, with a blade properties editor, 3D viewer, and airfoil polar visualization.
Configure. Select your IEC wind class, turbulence category, and design load cases. TurbineX has IEC standards built into the workflow — from onshore (61400-1) to fixed-bottom and floating offshore (61400-3-1, 61400-3-2) — with DLC templates, seed management, wind condition matrices, and metocean conditions handled automatically. You can also run parametric sweeps across wind, structural, operational, and aerodynamic parameters.
Run. Launch your campaign with one click. TurbineX distributes jobs across cloud workers, tracks progress in real time, and handles failures and reruns. You can run simulations concurrently at scale — what used to take a week on a workstation finishes in hours.
Analyze. Results come back structured, not as a pile of binary output files. Time series plots, channel-vs-channel scatter plots, power spectral densities, rainflow-counted fatigue DELs, extreme load rankings — all computed automatically and displayed in a browser-based viewer. Export to CSV, download PDFs, or pull data through our REST API.
No scripts. No HPC tickets. No "which version of the post-processing code did we use on that project?"
Who this is for
Consultancies
If you run a wind energy consultancy, your margins live and die on how efficiently you can turn around load analysis. TurbineX gives you isolated workspaces per client, usage tracking per project, and exportable reports that your clients and their certifiers can trust.
Turbine OEMs
Design iteration speed is a competitive advantage. TurbineX lets you run thousands of DLC cases per design variant, compare load envelopes across configurations, and get to type certification faster. Full provenance — inputs, outputs, solver version, timestamps — means you always have the audit trail ready.
Independent engineers and small firms
Access enterprise-grade simulation infrastructure without enterprise-grade overhead. No HPC to manage, no scripts to maintain, no servers to provision.
Educators and researchers
OpenFAST is already the most widely used aeroelastic code in academia. TurbineX removes the setup barrier entirely — no compilation, no environment configuration, no cluster access needed. Students can focus on the physics, not the plumbing.
Why open-source physics matters
TurbineX is built around open-source solvers because transparency is non-negotiable in engineering. When you submit a load case, you should be able to trace every assumption, inspect every input, and reproduce every output. Proprietary, closed-source solvers make this impossible by design.
By building on open-source physics and wrapping it in a modern, auditable workflow, TurbineX gives teams the transparency they need without the operational burden that usually comes with running open-source tools at scale.
The vision: end-to-end wind project simulation
Today, TurbineX handles aeroelastic simulation — the core of wind turbine design and certification. But our roadmap extends across the full project lifecycle:
Design optimization.We are integrating system-level design tools (building on NREL's WISDEM framework) so that teams can explore the design space — rotor diameter, tower configuration, drivetrain choices — before committing to detailed load analysis.
Digital twin operations. Post-commissioning, turbines generate SCADA data that can be compared against simulation predictions. TurbineX will connect operational data to simulation models, enabling condition monitoring, performance diagnostics, and remaining-useful-life estimation — all grounded in the same physics-based models used during design.
The goal is a single platform that follows a wind turbine from concept through certification through decades of operation.
Try it today
TurbineX is live at turbinex.app. Load a reference turbine, configure your first load case, and run a simulation in minutes.
If you are working on a wind project and spending more time managing simulations than interpreting them, we built this for you.
Georgios Deskos is the founder and CEO of TurbineX. Previously a Senior Researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), he led research in computational fluid dynamics, aeroelastic simulation, and wind farm modelling. His work at NREL contributed directly to the development of the open-source tools that TurbineX is built upon.