ACCIONA Energía is a world leader in the renewable energy sector. The company focuses its activity on wind energy, a field in which it has so far installed 5,577 MW as of 30 September 2008. Acciona is one of the pioneer clients of the WindCube and currently operates 3 units for various purposes: with a met tower to confirm the wind shears in the upper heights of the vertical wind profile or as the sole measurement sensor to map the wind flow on complex and difficult sites where the uncertainty for vertical and horizontal extrapolation is too high.

Alpha Wind Energy is a Danish company specialized in the development of wind energy projects. It has operated a WindCube LIDAR for more than a year in Riff, a remote location in the Norway Sea with harsh off-shore climate conditions and helicopter-only access during the winter. “LIDARs fulfill our requirements to be able to do accurate wind measurement on remote locations where a conventional mast is not feasible for various reasons. This is only the starting point; however, we want to explore other applications such as turbulence measurements where LIDARs will be a better sensor for a short period. We chose this WindCube LIDAR technology because it had gone through comprehensive development and test phases. We witnessed parts of this and found WindCube ready for an actual measurement campaign. The results have not let us down. This is only the beginning of LIDAR technology and we hope to take it much further,” said Klavs Andersen, wind resources manager at Alpha Wind Energy.

Vattenfall AB is a Swedish electricity supplier who massively invests to expand wind power generation in all regions in which the company operates. It uses the WindCube LIDAR to determine the wind conditions over a large area of Sweden heavily covered with forest. Before entering the decision making process, the system is tested and validated at  Risø’s Høvsøre test site to make sure that measurements are not only easy to process but also reliable and available, in order for them to be bankable.

“An accurate, reliable and mobile technology  is required to measure on our sites, and we expect this from WindCube LIDAR. First results from Høvsøre confirm our expectations,” said Rico Baudisch,  R&D Engineer Wind Power at Vattenfall.