In November 2014 we asked the industry ‘can we bank on wind Lidar’?
Can we use it to provide quantitative data for the annual energy prediction of a wind farm, allowing developers to raise or ratify the necessary finance to progress and construct full-scale developments? Today, in 2022, that question has not only been answered, spoiler alert: it’s a ‘yes’, but the industry is now not just ‘banking’ on it, it is ‘relying’ on it. And, by doing so it is managing to reduce wind measurement uncertainty to below that of the met mast and installed cup anemometry. Let’s see how we got to that position of finance-grade, more certain wind data from wind Lidars.
Onshore
A decade ago, in October 2012 the ground-based vertical-profiling wind Lidar ZephIR 300 was declared ‘bankable’ by DNV, known at the time as GL Garrad Hassan. ZephIR 300 was accepted for use in finance-grade wind speed and energy assessments, with either no or limited on-site mast comparisons.
