EOLOS Floating LiDAR wraps up two-year campaign at Moray West

Moray Offshore Windfarm (West), majority owned by Ocean Winds, has completed a two-year resource measurement campaign for which it deployed an EOLOS Floating Lidar at the Moray West site, located next to the Moray East and Beatrice offshore wind farms.

The developer contracted EOLOS as a turn-key provider of wind and ocean measurements in summer 2018, and deployed the floating LiDAR at the end of that year. For the Spain-based company, this was the first project in the UK waters.

“After two and half years of working with EOLOS on the Moray West metocean measurement campaign we are delighted to reach the important milestone of decommissioning the measurement buoy. This marks the conclusion to a successful measurement campaign that allows the project to move forward to a bankable yield assessment”, said Ocean Winds Energy Assessment and Metocean representative for the project, Guillermo Tornero de Diego.

According to Ocean Winds, a joint venture between Engie and EDP Renewables, the twenty-four-month campaign has been completed without incident, and with high performance and data availability.

EOLOS said that Ocean Winds confirmed that EOLOS achieved a “remarkable average” over the consolidated two years of 95 per cent post-processed availability. The campaign’s term and performance provide another tick-in the box for exceeding the Carbon Trust’s “Stage 3” key performance indicators, the company said.

“The operational success of this prestigious campaign is clearly a credit to our entire team, recognising the EOLOS buoy’s inherently robust design and also the high wind data availability across all measurement heights of the industry recognised ZX 300M LiDAR from our UK-based supplier, ZX Lidars”, said Julian Harland, Sales Director at EOLOS.

“Its pleasing for the entire industry that site-specific measurements in the hostile environment of the North Sea are recognised as bankable when carried out by floating LiDAR devices, delivering results upon which established developers such as Ocean Winds will make very significant capital investment decisions”, Julian Harland said.

The 850 MW Moray West will comprise up to 85 wind turbines and up to two offshore substations installed in the Outer Moray Firth, some 22.5 kilometres southeast of the Caithness coastline.

Now fully consented, the project is developing engineering detail at the same time as securing a route to market in advance of starting construction. The current planning is based on the project being operational in 2024/25.