LiDAR: Empowering wind energy’s ascent

Globally, wind generation capacity is ballooning, increasing by 75 GW or 9% in 2022. With new on and offshore projects currently in planning and construction to meet increasingly urgent renewable energy goals, the planet’s installed wind energy capacity will only continue escalating. But with growth comes challenges – and an increasing need for accurate and reliable wind data measurements.

Meteorological masts cannot accurately measure the wind’s behaviour at the un-precedented hub height of today’s towering turbines. They are also extremely costly and hold significant safety risks for wind farms constructed in increasingly complex terrains or harsh offshore environments farther from shorelines.

Given these growing concerns, LiDAR – or light detection and ranging – is rapidly emerging as the industry’s new standard for wind measurement, empowering users with accurate, widely accepted – and often bankable – data. LiDAR provides safe, accurate, and cost-effective solutions throughout the lifecycle of wind energy projects, helping stakeholders and decision-makers overcome challenges and open new avenues to success.

LiDAR: Technology for today’s wind projects

Modern LiDAR systems have achieved parity with met mast data and outpace met masts in most situations.

Met masts typically can only measure up to the full height of modern turbines with mathematical extrapolation, introducing the possibility of error. Worse yet, these tall structures equipped with anemometers and other meteorological instruments require long permitting processes and can come with high equipment and maintenance costs and significant safety hazards.

jLiDAR, on the other hand, sends light beams into the atmosphere, which are reflected and returned by particulates moving with the wind. Using the Doppler effect, the LiDAR unit analyses the frequency of those reflections and computes a highly reliable wind speed. Pulsed LiDAR technology measures multiple heights simultaneously, providing a complete wind profile with no temporal resolution or accuracy compromises. And multiple measurement heights mean more data, more quickly, providing constant spatial resolution throughout the entire wind profile.

LiDAR units deliver data as accurate as met mast data and fully comply with International Electrotechnical Commission and other regulatory standards. LiDAR’s range of available data is extensive, as is the processing power of modern LiDAR units and their related software. The technology also often comes with modern, cloud-based management and analytics tools, making its insights more accessible and easier to manage. These factors improve situational awareness and allow for previously unattainable benefits, like out-of-the-box power performance testing (PTT) according to industry best practices and the IEC standard.

In some situations, LiDAR complements met masts – filling in gaps in the data, validating and expanding measurements and drastically reducing uncertainty. The technology’s ease of use and deployment — and its ability to accurately measure the full wind profile of even the largest turbines and assess wind characteristics across larger areas – make LiDAR instruments ideal for reducing costs, speeding up wind energy projects, and maximising wind turbine performance and profitability.

A LiDAR solution for each stage of wind energy projects

Onshore and offshore, LiDAR technology supports every stage of a wind farm project.

Precise wind resource assessment

In the critical phase of Wind Resource Assessment (WRA), LiDAR instruments provide a distinct advantage over traditional methods, enabling developers to efficiently and accurately assess the wind characteristics of potential sites, both onshore and offshore.

Some ground-based or buoy-mounted vertical wind-profiling LiDARs provide accurate wind measurements up to 300 m over 20 simultaneous heights. LiDAR’s mobility, cost-effectiveness and ability to deploy in remote, complex terrain or difficult-to-reach offshore environments underscore the technology’s value in conducting wind measurement campaigns quickly and safely without the need for expensive met mast installations.

For onshore WRA campaigns, developers like RES are embracing standalone vertical profiling LiDAR campaigns using systems like Vaisala’s WindCube^® vertical profiling LiDAR. RES completed a 12-month measurement campaign at Northern Ireland’s Corlacky Hill wind farm using a single verified LiDAR, representing a 40% cost savings over a conventional met mast setup. The LiDAR data helped optimise turbine layout and maximise energy yield with zero safety incidents.

Complementing vertical profiling LiDARs are scanning LiDARs, which offer large scale, detailed 3D wind mapping capabilities. These LiDARs can scan in multiple patterns, providing a comprehensive picture of wind conditions across a wide area, up to 10 km, sometimes even 15 km in range. This spatial wind data is invaluable for site suitability assessments, wind flow modelling and reducing uncertainty in WRA campaigns. Wind farm operators can also take advantage of scanning LiDARs to measure the wakes generated by the turbines directly, thus optimising the farm’s power generation by applying wake steering strategies.

Green Power Investment, also known as GPI, is based in Japan and wields extensive experience in offshore wind farms. Already realising the value of a single scanning LiDAR approach, the renewable energy company deployed dual scanning LiDARs to perform offshore WRA measurements up to 10 km from the coastline. This approach creates multiple offshore ‘virtual’ met masts, making more accurate wind map designs and reducing horizontal wind modelling uncertainty by 6%.

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