Wind wake project will improve offshore turbine layouts

The new £2m wake effects measurement project will provide detailed measurement data to the wind industry to help better understand how the wind behaves in complex situations offshore. This is expected to help industry to improve prediction accuracy, reduce financing costs and optimise windfarm layouts as they move further offshore.

The wakes effects measurement project is part of the Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator, an industry collaboration with nine UK wind farm developers to identify and commercialise a series of innovations which can reduce the costs of offshore wind.

Specialist wakes monitoring equipment has been installed on the Rødsand 2 windfarm in Denmark and will measure wakes passing through the wind farm for at least six months.

Carbon Trust believes data gathered from the project will help improve specialist software, enabling developers to better predict how the wind will flow offshore, thereby enabling them to develop better and more efficient designs and layouts. This in turn is expected to increase energy yields from offshore wind farms and improve the economics of the offshore wind projects.