Narec, the national centre for the UK dedicated to advancing the development, demonstration, deployment and grid integration of renewable energy and low carbon generation technologies, is developing an offshore wind farm site in the North Sea comprising up to 20 pre-consented “pods”, at which tenants may deploy their prototype or pre-commercial turbines and foundations.
As part of this project Narec has deployed a ZephIR lidar at an onshore site close to the eventual offshore location to provide a greater understanding of the wind characteristics across the site, building on existing wind assessment work. ZephIR wind data is the initial phase of a comprehensive wind measurement campaign that will eventually include offshore measurements from the demonstrator site.
Natural Power’s ZephIR Service Engineer, Carl Barrow, is seen opposite commissioning the system with Jonathan Hughes of Narec.
Natural Power’s ZephIR lidar provides wind measurements from 10m to 200m above the installed device. The lower heights measured offer the opportunity to correlate with existing measurements whilst the higher heights will be of relevance to the next generation of offshore wind turbines, considering the heights that they could reach. Overall a better understanding of the wind shear relevant to the turbine swept area will be derived.
Nathalie Stevenson the Offshore Demonstrator Project Manager stated ‘This is an important milestone for the project. Potential demonstrators require wind resource and energy yield data as soon as possible so that they can assess the suitability of the site for their next generation turbines. This deployment marks the start of a robust wind measurement campaign, and will be complimented by the deployment of a traditional anemometry mast and another lidar on the offshore platform which will be installed late spring/early summer next year. Narec are very pleased to be working with Natural Power and look forward to seeing the results.
Ian Locker, ZephIR MD at Natural Power commented : “We have worked with Narec for many years and this week is the fruition of our hopes to install ZephIR on this exciting offshore test site, providing hub height measurements and beyond for the offshore turbines and devices of the future. ZephIR has itself been proven across similar test sites over the past 6 years and it is fantastic to see that it now works as the benchmark measurement device on this project.”
[mappress]
Source: naturalpower, October 22, 2010