ZephIR - case study 2 - NaiKun - North America

In 2006 NaiKun began working with Natural Power on a novel approach to gathering wind data offshore for the Hecate Strait wind farm project off the coast of North West British Columbia. Not wishing to compromise data accuracy by reducing mast installation costs, NaiKun looked at remote sensing technologies as a way forward.



Over the following months NaiKun developed a world-class marine meteorological station equipped with ZephIR as the sole on-site resource assessment tool to provide a bankable wind regime across the site, plus a number of other high-tech devices for measuring sea current velocities and wave heights, periods and direction. All data is transmitted in real-time to their wind resource managers in Germany, and met-ocean managers in Victoria, BC. The data collected will play an important role in pre-engineering the project and identifying optimal siting of wind turbine locations.

“Natural Power’s ZephIR will improve our ability to profile the resource by providing wind measurements within the entire area of a turbine blade rotation; from base to hub height within seconds. Traditional anemometers provide data, but only at one height and cannot capture other wind characteristics, such as density or turbulence, like this particular LiDAR system does,” noted Peter Hunter, Vice President for Design & Planning at NaiKun Wind Development. “The difference in technology is dramatic, not unlike that between an X-Ray and CT scan. Instead of a snapshot of the resource, using ZephIR we can gain a multi-dimensional understanding of the wind resource and several characteristics at the project site. The data collected will be used to optimise project design and layout of the wind farm.”



ZephIR has now successfully been gathering data on the station for the past 12 months, acting as the sole on-site resource assessment tool. The platform has been managed by GL WINDTEST - the world’s leading certification body in the wind energy field.

GL WINDTEST has extensive experience in certifying onshore and offshore wind energy products and projects, responsible for more than 50% of all certifications. GL WINDTEST has been providing NaiKun with operational support, data collection from the ZephIR via SatComms, system integrity checks and the ongoing data analysis in the Hecate Strait wind farm project.

Commenting on the success of the project, Detlef Kindler, Senior Offshore Project Manager for GL WINDTEST highlighted that “one critical performance indicator of such remote solutions described here is availability and ensuring continuous data collection. ZephIR has achieved 95% data availability for the past 9 months demonstrating it’s reliability and suitability in such challenging conditions.” Kindler also commented that “with more than 3 years of operating ZephIR’s the system can now be seen not as an emerging technology but as a product and tool that wind engineers should call upon for wind resource assessment. The NaiKun project has clearly demonstrated that ZephIR can assist developers not only onshore but now offshore also.”