Hinesburg, VT, USA, April 20th 2016 – RNRG and Ventus Ingenieria have announced the acquisition and installation of a Wind Iris nacelle-mounted Lidar at the 20MW Caracoles wind farm in Uruguay. The Wind Iris will monitor turbine performance and offer optimization solutions for the project.
Located in the Sierra de Caracoles in the Maldonado region, the project is composed of ten Vestas V80 2MW machines. The wind farm is owned by UTE, Uruguay’s national utility and electricity market regulator. UTE has the monopoly over all distribution and transmission activities across country. It is also the off-taker of all private wind farms with PPAs.
The measurement campaign’s objective is to evaluate and quantify the performance of one specific turbine with the state-of-the-art Lidar technology available today and to propose solutions to improve the energy production. Based on the results reported by RNRG and Ventus, UTE will evaluate the success of the campaign and make a decision regarding the potential performance evaluation of the other wind turbines in the fleet.
Commissioned in 2010, Caracoles is the very first wind farm commissioned in Uruguay. Since then, the country experienced a spectacular wind energy boom. With 850MW already operating and more than 650MW set to be installed in the next 12 months, Uruguay is taking a leading position in South America’s energy transition.
