Oldbaum Services Completes LiDAR Project in Japan

Scotland-based wind data consultancy Oldbaum Services has completed a project to collect data for offshore wind energy projects off Japan by using an onshore scanning LiDAR.

Oldbaum Energy carried out the project in partnership with NRG Renewables.

The company installed the Leosphere W200S, a long range, remote sensing system in the Hokkaido province to gather and interpret data for an offshore wind energy project from an onshore location.

“Scanning LiDAR is an important data acquisition technique development,” said Oldbaum’s Technical Director Andy Oldroyd.

“The ability to record winds well out to sea whilst operating from a safe onshore environment greatly reduces cost, but also gives valuable wind speed variation data in areas where numerical techniques are well known to struggle. Scanning LiDAR when used appropriately can give developers valuable insight to the wind regime their development will encounter. In this case we are very fortunate that the range and power of the 200S allows us to scan the entire wind farm development zone.”

In its latest policy, Japan has set an ambitious target of developing offshore wind farms with a combined capacity of 37 GW by 2050.

High wind resources in the north of the country, one of the world’s most generous renewable Feed-in-Tariff schemes and being the world’s third largest economy, makes Japan an attractive market for offshore wind developers, Oldenbaum Energy said in a statement.