Danes issue €13 million floating LiDAR call for tenders

Danish transmission system operator (TSO) Energinet has launched a tender for the provision of several floating LiDARs that will be installed at the new offshore wind farm sites in Denmark. The tender, valued at a total of €13 million, includes multiple floating LiDARs per site for both deployment and contingency.

There are four new sites the Danish government has designated for offshore wind farms, which could add as much as 7.2 GW of new capacity: North Sea I (Nordsø I), Kattegat II, Kriegers Flak II, and Hesselø.

In autumn this year, the board of the Danish TSO Energinet officially gave the green light to carry out feasibility studies for the new offshore wind areas and, this month, the Danish Energy Agency (DEA) issued permits to Energinet to initiate preliminary site investigations at Kattegat II, Kriegers Flak II and Hesselø.

Now, Energinet is also looking to deploy floating LiDARs for twelve-month wind measurement campaigns at the four sites, with the tender open for applications until 18 January 2023.

Two floating LiDAR buoys will be deployed in the Kattegat Sea, where Kattegat II and Hesselø South sites are located, with one additional buoy planned to be kept in reserve for contingency. The contract(s) for this area are worth €4 million.

The lot for the Kriegers Flak II offshore wind area in the Baltic Sea is also looking for two floating LiDARs and one buoy to be kept for contingency, and is also valued at €4 million.

At the North Sea I area, three floating LiDAR will be deployed and one kept in reserve, under a contract worth €5 million.

The one-year contracts will contain an extension option for either another twelve-month period, or a month-to-month extensions for up to six months.

The four new areas for offshore wind development in Denmark were identified after the Danish Energy Agency carried out fine screening of a number of areas that could potentially host new offshore wind farms, including alternative locations for the Hesselø project whose originally planned site was deemed unsuitable. 

In the summer of 2022, the fine screening concluded that the four areas were suitable for setting up offshore wind farms and shortly after that the Danish political parties signed an agreement on the new location for the Hesselø offshore wind farm, moving the project site to the south of the initially chosen area.