Formed in 2007 to finance the development of wind farms in Central and Eastern Europe, Continental Wind Partners (CWP) uses the Triton Sonic Wind Profiler as a part of its standard wind resource assessment practice. The developer is using advanced remote sensing (with eight Tritons) to expedite wind farm development, reduce project uncertainty and streamline project financing at sites in five Eastern European countries.
Triton is a sodar-based (sound detection and ranging) remote sensing system that measures wind at higher heights than most tower-based devices. By measuring wind speeds at the turbine rotor’s hub height and beyond (up to 200 m), the sodar unit reduces uncertainty in annual energy production forecasts. Its ease of deployment also streamlines wind-farm developments. The design have been in commercial use since April 2008 with over 200 installed worldwide.
“Although met-tower data remains a key part of wind project financing, remote sensing is becoming more necessary to reduce uncertainty by measuring hub height wind conditions,” says Konrad Gorzkowski, Wind & Site Engineer at CWP. “We like the unit because of its low power requirements, mobility, and data reliability.”
CWP uses the sodar units to support its project development activities, and in doing so has accumulated nearly 100,000 hours of data in Central and Eastern Europe. On sites with existing met towers, CWP has deployed a Triton at several locations around the site to better map the available wind resources, an approach known as micro-siting. “Triton always correlates well to the met tower measurements and provides valuable information on each site’s large height shear profile,” says Maciej Baginski, Wind Measurement and GIS Specialist at PS Wind Management, CWP’s Poland-based development group.
CWP expects the sodar units to give an advantage in securing project financing. In one example, a single unit was deployed at five different locations on a greenfield site that already had a met tower. Triton measurements reduced this project’s resource uncertainty by three percent, compared with use of the met tower data alone, which directly led to a considerably higher P75 figure.
Second wind Inc.
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