A campaign to gather more than two years’ worth of wind data crucial for the development of the Ossian floating offshore wind farm has been completed.
Two floating LiDAR buoys (FLiDAR) have been deployed to survey the 858 km2 site, 84 km off the east coast of Scotland, since August 2022. Using profiling lasers, the buoys measure wind speed and direction at 10 different sample heights rising up from the surface of the North Sea to a maximum height of 300 m.
Assessment of the data is essential for the project’s design and understanding the wind resource potential across the project site, one of the largest to be offered by Crown Estate Scotland to any bidder in the ScotWind leasing round.
Ossian’s Metocean and Wind Measurement Campaign Manager, Lucas Neidhardt, said: “Gathering this information is vital to predicting energy yield, and therefore completing the campaign is another significant accomplishment for the project.
“Operating in the North Sea is not without its technical and environmental challenges and this campaign was no different.
“We are pleased with what has been achieved and confident of the quality of the data gathered.”
Ossian is a joint venture between SSE Renewables, Marubeni, and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP). Delivery of the project will be subject to securing planning consent, route to market and a final investment decision. Once operational, the offshore wind farm would have a capacity of up to 3.6 GW which is enough to be capable of powering up to 6 million homes annually.
The wind measurement campaign was part of a package including a 12 months metocean campaign which gathered millions of data points relating to wave heights, currents, tides, and sediment movements. As well as underpinning engineering design and environmental impact assessment, the metocean data is also used to predict conditions during the construction and deployment of the wind farm.
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