QinetiQ's wind sensing tool, the ZephIR LiDAR, has been selected to assess the wind resource for the Beatrice wind farm demonstrator project in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland. The ZephIR system will first undergo a series of evaluation and certification tests to ensure the accuracy of its wind measurements. These tests will be conducted by the German company Windtest at two sites, the Brunsbüttel test facility in western Germany and the FINO-1 platform in the North Sea off the German coast.
The Beatrice demonstrator project has been incorporated into the pan-European initiative, DOWNVInD (Distant Offshore Wind farms with No Visual Impact In Deepwater). DOWNVInD has been established as a catalyst for commercialising deepwater wind farm technology and includes 14 different organisations from six European countries. QinetiQ's ZephIR system is based on LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) and works by measuring the Doppler shift of radiation scattered from a moving object. In the case of wind LiDAR, the objects off which the radiation scatters are actually airborne particles - typically dust or water droplets which are carried along with the wind. In this way wind speed and direction may be measured remotely from a ground-based instrument.