Fugro’s Seawatch Wind LiDAR Buoy has achieved Stage 3 rating under the Carbon Trust Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA) Roadmap for the Commercial Acceptance of floating LiDAR technology.
Stage 3 of the Carbon Trust Offshore Wind Accelerator Roadmap focuses on proving consistently high levels of availability.
Data accuracy consistently met industry best-practice criteria in verification trials and, in addition, wind speed measurements in classification trials gave consistent results for sensitivity to environmental variables, Fugro said.
The evaluation was conducted by an independent classification society DNV.
“In receiving this world-first Stage 3 rating, we acknowledge the support of our offshore wind clients – in particular Orsted, Eolfi-Shell, Engie and Iberdrola – who kindly granted access to their measurement Geo-data for third-party assessment,” , said Jørn Erik Norangshol , Fugro’s Director for Monitoring and Forecasting in Norway.
The first commercial SEAWATCH Wind LiDAR was launched in 2013 after Furgo performed a series of experiments to investigate the effect of motion on a profiling wind LiDAR operating on its Wavescan buoy. That same year, the Carbon Trust Roadmap was issued.
In 2016, the SEAWATCH FLiDAR buoy was validated as Stage 2 (pre-commercial) based on a successful offshore met mast validation trial conducted some 75 kilometres from the Dutch shore, the company commented.
In February 2020, Spanish company EOLOS announced it had started fulfilling the floating LiDAR Stage 3 requirements after having two separate full-year deployment campaigns.
NOTE: The original article has been amended.