The Dual Mode Solution to Wind Resource Assessment and Turbine Performance Optimisation
March 2013 saw the tenth anniversary of the first commercial lidar deployment for wind energy applications – and while it is now commonplace to see wind lidars (such as ZephIR 300 and those that followed) in wind energy resource assessments, it was actually a turbine-mounted application for which the ZephIR technology was first deployed. Ten years on, and ZephIR’s continuous-wave (CW) lidar technology continues to be developed and is now gaining increasing acceptance in its original application of optimising wind turbine generator performance. This acceptance is founded on a body of evidence from ground-based operation spanning some 650+ deployments, 3.5 million operating hours and recent comprehensive comparative trials of 79 ZephIR 300s against an IEC-compliant met mast as part of an industry accepted validation process with banks’ engineers such as Natural Power and GL Garrad Hassan.By Alex Woodward, Head of Marketing, and Michael Harris, Chief Scientist, ZephIR Ltd, UK