Carbon Trust Drives Industry Acceptance of New Floating LiDAR Systems to Deliver Low-cost Bankable Wind Data
Wednesday 31 May 2017
The Carbon Trust has today announced the completion of the world’s largest trial of floating LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) systems. This trial has helped accelerate the offshore wind industry’s uptake of the technology by proving across a variety of technologies and sea states, the floating LiDAR’s capability of producing highly accurate, bankable wind measurement data.
Over the last seven years, floating LiDAR systems have evolved to be a cost-effective and accurate way of providing wind resource assessment measurements. Compared to the state-of-the-art meteorological masts (met mast), floating LiDAR systems offer many benefits including cheaper installation. Savings of up to 90 percent are possible, based on a typical investment of €10m for a met mast. Floating LiDAR is also quicker; both through the planning process (months rather than years) and deployment to the measurement campaign site (hours rather than days). Prior to these trials, the main barrier to wider deployment of floating LiDAR was a lack of validated data showing that these solutions could offer the levels of accuracy required by offshore wind project financiers at a fraction of the cost and deployment time.
Partners from the Carbon Trust’s flagship industry collaborative R&D programme, the Offshore Wind Accelerator funded the validation project in order to bring confidence to the market on the ability of the technology to deliver commercial grade wind speed and direction measurements.
During the four year trial a range of floating LiDAR devices were deployed alongside existing offshore met-masts to enable the comparison of wind speed and direction measurements. Over the course of the campaign five systems were tested at six different sites across Europe:
- Babcock at Gwynt y Mor;
- FLiDAR at Gwynt y Mor, Narec (now ORE Catapult Blyth), and Neart na Gaoithe;
- EOLOS FLS200 at IJmuiden Met Mast;
- Fugro Oceanor Seawatch Floating LiDAR at East Anglia ONE; and
- Fraunhofer IWES Wind LiDAR Buoy at FINO1 Met Mast.
More - https://www.carbontrust.com/news/2017/05/carbon-tr...