Desert Knowledge Australia

The Centre for Appropriate Technology (CAT) works to secure sustainable livelihoods Indigenous communities through appropriate technology. CAT provides information, knowledge and practical services across a range of areas including energy, housing and infrastructure, water, waste, telecommunications, transport and technical skills development. See http://www.dkasolarcentre.com.au/

Task

CAT is developing a Solar Centre which will form part of the $60 million development known as Desert Knowledge Precinct on the southern outskirts of Alice Springs. This Solar Centre showcases a range of solar energy technologies suitable for application in arid and semi-arid environments. CAT approached MA@D to provide online users and visitors to the facility access to interactive real-time and historical data for the various technologies.

Solution

Our solution was a three stage approach starting with the development of a website using the industry standard FarCry Content Management System (CMS). The second stage was to bring the raw technical data from the Solar Centre into an engaging and user friendly Data Visualisation Tool (DVT) using Adobe Flash as the front-end technology.

Finally, the third stage, a secure Raw Data Access portal, allows specialist visitors to download csv files of raw data from the ION database according to a number of user-defined criteria such as date range, resolution, technologies and weather.

Result

Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett officially launched the website in October 2008. The website is the first site in Australia to publicly showcase a broad range of large scale working solar installations. The CAT website is a world-first interactive website displaying real time data fed by the 15 solar installations on display which in turn will help meet the growing demand for knowledge and expertise in renewable energy technology.