Leading renewable energy consultancy group, Natural Power, has released results showing the performance of the first batch of ZephIR 300 units manufactured and deployed earlier this year, following the launch of the product in November 2010. The sample of fifteen ZephIR 300s show all units exceeding industry recognised standards across measurement heights from just 20 metres (60 ft) up to 91m (270 ft), demonstrating the suitability of the system on wind resource assessment projects and associated applications. These systems have since been commercially deployed to a number of countries including India, Poland, the UK, China and the US.
As the wind industry matures and devices such as lidar are increasingly used to collect wind resource data, there has been a shift in lidar being considered new to being a proven and repeatable technology. This shift has been facilitated by the application of industry accepted processes such as the validation process derived between Banks Engineers GL Garrad Hassan and Natural Power. This process includes a controlled deployment at the UKs Lidar & Sodar Test Site in Worcestershire, UK where the accuracy, reliability and repeatability of units is confirmed to an agreed set of Best Practice standards against the 91m IEC compliant, fully instrumented, tall met mast. Any remote sensing device lidar or sodar can be tested at this site.
Natural Power has now released these results from the first batch of ZephIR 300 units manufactured in early 2011, which show very high levels of agreement with the mast across all heights and all units, exceeding the industry accepted pass criteria of a 2% agreement with the cup anemometers. The majority of systems were passed at a far higher level, with as little as just 0.03% difference to the cup anemometers. Clients purchasing ZephIR 300 systems are offered certificates of performance which can be provided by Natural Power or GL Garrad Hassan.
Agreement of ZephIR 300s compared to IEC compliant cup anemometers, by percentage points.
Red lines show industry accepted pass of 2% (gradient)
Ian Locker, ZephIR MD within Natural Power commented: Demonstrating performance, repeatability and robustness of wind lidar is a key step forward for all device manufacturers Working closely with others in the industry and operating units at the UK Lidar & Sodar Test Site has enabled us to manufacture and deliver ZephIR 300s to an industry accepted standard for use in wind energy applications, often surpassing this standard by some margin. Coupled with our near-perfect wind tunnel testing earlier this month we are confident that batches produced through volume manufacturing are the best theyve ever been.
For more information sales@zephirlidar.com or visit www.zephirlidar.com
