Norway’s Equinor (formerly Statoil) has contracted RPS engineers and scientists from Australia and the US to develop a long-term meteorological and oceanographic (metocean) measurement program for a potential wind farm development off the east coast of the US.
RPS will use floating light detection and ranging (FLiDAR) and a suite of other instruments to generate information about waves, wind, turbulence and current conditions.
The company will analyse the FLiDAR data it collects for the Equinor site study in tandem with information from its directional wave buoys, current meters and existing comparison data to inform power generation calculations and future turbine array engineering, installation and maintenance planning.
Equinor is in the early stages of development of the Empire Wind project offshore New York. Located on a 79,350 acre site secured in a federal auction in December 2016 , the project has the potential to generate up to 1GW of offshore wind power.
The company has also expressed interest in acquiring an unsolicited lease area offshore Massachusetts.