10 LIDAR SUPPLEMENT


ADVERTORIAL


Lidar gaining worldwide support from the wind community


Seven years ago saw the public release of a revolutionary and ground-breaking new technology – wind lidar. Now, products such as ZephIR are becoming the standard in the wind community, gaining global support through networks of industry leaders. ZephIR, a Natural Power product innovation, was the world’s first commercially available wind lidar and has subsequently been the world’s first to take measurements from a wind turbine ‘spinner’ and the world’s first offshore wind lidar – both on a fixed and floating platform.


ZephIR, including current model ZephIR 300, has now accumulated its two-millionth operational hour, spanning over 450 deployments across 32 countries. A major part of this global adoption has been through the establishment of a validation process for wind lidar technology with Banks’ Engineer GL Garrad Hassan. This requires a traceable ZephIR data set to be compared to a traditional tall met mast, satisfying an agreed set of rigorous criteria such as accuracy and deployment time. To that end, renewable energy consultancy group Natural Power established the UK’s Lidar and Sodar test site in 2010, see Figure 1, an IEC- approved measurement site installed with a 91m met mast including: calibrated Risø cups and Vector 100L cups based at 20m, 45m, 70m and 91m; a pressure sensor logger at 6m; a temperature sensor mounted at 80m. Each ZephIR system spends the agreed period of time at this site before, and in some cases after, finance-grade wind resource assessments are made worldwide to provide wind engineers and the financial


community with the confidence they need to utilise the lidar data. By establishing this testing process and


through accumulating an extensive body of evidence, ZephIR has been granted acceptance for sole use on simple sites onshore and offshore, and complementary to a short mast on complex sites. ZephIR has also established a global network of ‘Trusted Service Providers’ – companies with extensive ZephIR experience who can provide in- country support to clients wishing to use ZephIR and ZephIR data in projects. These include fellow industry leaders GL Garrad Hassan, AWS Truepower and DNV as well as local consultancy / engineering firms such as New Energy Scout (Switzerland), Oldbaum Services (UK) and Beijing New Energy Technology Co. (China). Leading technical and research groups such as Risø DTU (Denmark) and CRES (Greece) are also signed-up to supporting ZephIR systems. Further technical development work over the last decade has also nurtured a sister product to


ZephIR 300 – ControlZephIR – which provides wind turbine control systems with the necessary data from full circular scans, a number of distances in front of the turbine, allowing the turbine to control yaw accurately (steer into the wind) and also adjust the individual blade pitches throughout their cycle of rotation to maximise performance as well as power curve measurement. Potentially more significant, ControlZephIR data can be used to adjust blade pitch safely in high gusts or turbulence aimed at extending the lifetime and reducing through-life costs of a wind turbine generator as a result of any operations &


Figure 2 ZephIR measurements compared to LM Wind Power wind tunnel instrumentation, Denmark, from 5m/s to 75 m/s


maintenance downtime. These turbine peak and fatigue load reductions will also allow for potentially significant savings in turbine manufacturing costs. ControlZephIR has already undergone extensive testing across prototype installations in 2003, 2009 and 2010, in addition to a world-first wind tunnel test with LM Wind Power, Risø DTU and NKT Photonics which demonstrated near-perfect accuracy of the system shown in Figure 2. ControlZephIR is currently being mass produced in the UK prior to roll-out at the end of 2011. With seven years operational experience,


Figure 1 ZephIR 175 and smaller ZephIR 300 units deployed at UK Lidar Test Site by 91m met mast


International Sustainable Energy Review Volume 5, Issue 3, 2011


ZephIR has now uniquely positioned itself as a global provider of wind lidar data delivered through the required, industry accepted, traceable validation process for onshore, offshore and turbine-mounted applications.


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