Alan Mortimer
Director of Innovation Wood Clean Energy
St Vincent Plaza 319 St Vincent St Glasgow G2 5LP United Kingdom alan.Mortimer@woodplc.com www.woodplc.com
Complex Wind Profiles Measured Offshore and
Their Relevance to Airborne Systems
Alan Mortimer, Daniel Gallacher
Wood Clean Energy Airborne wind energy systems have the obvious
advan-tage of being able to exploit the stronger and stead-ier wind speeds typically found at higher altitudes than those experienced by ground-based wind turbines. How-ever, the relationship between wind speed and height above the sea (called wind shear) is often complex, as has been shown by long term measurements using scanning lidar systems.
Wood Clean Energy has years of experience of measur-ing wind conditions at offshore locations and has built up a good understanding of complex sheer characteris-tics and their prevalence, along with other important pa-rameters including veer, diurnal effects and seasonal vari-ations. This understanding is considered essential for op-timal design of airborne wind energy systems and may in fact present a further opportunity where lidar mea-surements can be integrated with system controls in real time, thereby hunting the strongest and steadiest winds at whichever altitude they are occurring at that point in time.
Wood Clean Energy will share its findings from several off-shore lidar measurement campaigns in the context of air-borne wind system requirements and will invite engage-ment with the sector on further work to support the com-mercialisation of this exciting technology. Approximately nine years of lidar measurements, acquired since 2011 at four North Sea locations, were used to assess wind condi-tions between 40 and 300 m above sea level. Focus was
placed on the identification of complex shear events (in-clusive of low level jets (LLJs)). Diurnal, directional and seasonal variation of complex shear events will be dis-cussed and their implications for operations.
Discussion will also include future lidar applications of value for the Airborne sector including the potential for active control, and wake characterisation.
Lidar measured wind shear profiles.
