Nov 22 2010
Windlab, a global wind energy development company, declared that it has started using the Second Wind manufactured Triton Sonic Wind Profilers, regularly for assessing the wind speed. The company has acquired 12 tritons to include the remote sensing feature to its globally practiced wind resource evaluation studies. The company currently operates in countries such as South Africa, United States, Australia and Canada.
When the company utilized Triton for a wind assessment study in the US along with Midwest, a developing company, it found that the Triton can be advantageously used to measure the wind speeds at and over the hub heights of the wind turbines. The traditional tower-based wind resource estimation methods were depending on extrapolation procedures to gauge the wind speeds at hub height level and more. The method remained unpredictable and in certain cases resulted in vagueness in assessments. Windlab utilized Triton systems incorporate SODAR technology to gauge the wind speed more accurately than the earlier used tower-based standard levels. The new technology allows measuring of wind speeds up to 200 m thus reducing the ambiguity in predicting the annual energy production (AEP). The instrument can be deployed easily and it simplifies the wind resource appraisal process.
Nathan Steggel, Co-founder of Windlab, said that the Triton units assist the company to complete the assessment of a wind project quickly and it does away with the requirement of taking met tower permissions to move the units between sites. He further said that it allows the company to take a quick decision by comparing the Triton data with that of the tower mounted sensors than the earlier method of remote sensing systems.