Our philosophy on accuracy

This is the third post in our series of deeper dives into the four pillars of our design philosophy – safety, reliability, accuracy, and resilience – and how they’re are embodied in our technology. Our previous posts focused on our commitment to safety and features of our design aimed at reducing downtime. Today’s post focuses on accuracy.

Prior to the advent of floating LiDARs, met masts were the industry standard for capturing accurate wind data. The problem, however, was that they did so by introducing significant time and financial barriers. Floating LiDARs, by contrast, don’t require expensive foundations to be built into the seabed and are therefore a powerful tool for reducing development costs and unlocking deep-water sites that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive. (This is especially important with the recent emergence of floating turbines to facilitate windfarm development in deeper waters.)

But while reducing costs and opening new frontiers are exciting prospects, any alternative to the old technology is only viable if it can achieve the standard of accuracy developers have come to expect. Generally speaking, a 1% decrease in data uncertainty accounts for approximately 3% in energy uncertainty, so the cost to a developer and its financing partners from even a minor deviation can be substantial.

Wind speed and wind turbine power output are related through the above formula, where ρ and A correspond to air density and swept area, respectively.

To ensure floating LiDARs measure up, suppliers typically quantify their performance by conducting a trial wind measurement campaign alongside a traditional met mast and comparing the two data sets. Using this approach, we can confidently say that our technology meets The Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (“OWA”) Floating LiDAR Roadmap’s best practice criteria - the preeminent industry standard.

We’re able to achieve these results using a sophisticated motion compensation algorithm (to remove the effect of buoy movement from the collected data) and a structural design that lowers the buoy’s center of gravity (to maintain a tilt angle below 15° over 99% of the time and ensure the collected raw data remains a valid input to the algorithm).

Ultimately, the challenge of offshore wind measurement is to collect accurate data consistently at remote sites and under harsh conditions. With world-class technology, thoughtful design choices, and a dedicated team who understands the importance of a wind measurement campaign in the lifecycle of a development project, we’re tackling that challenge head-on.