OSLO, Norway — TGS has committed to a new campaign for offshore wind and metocean measurement off the US West Coast.
The company is seeking to improve the industry’s understanding of offshore conditions across three wind energy lease areas in Morro Bay, California, through calibrating proprietary wind models with observational data.
This will be a three-year deployment in an area with an average water depth of 1,000 m and also TGS’ first program on the West Coast. The data should provide crucial insights throughout the floating wind farm development life cycle, the company added, including for environmental impact assessments, turbine selection, layout optimization, foundation design, and operations and maintenance planning.
It should also facilitate more accurate modeling of likely capex and opex, potential energy production and grid requirements.
Ocean current measurements should support grid connection, and atmospheric turbulence intensity observations will provide inputs for wind farm energy yield.
The EOLOS-supplied buoy for the campaign is equipped with sensors to capture detailed measurements of wind, metocean and environmental data. These will include wind speed and direction at turbine hub height, wave heights, ocean current data across the full water column, and monitoring of birds, bats and fish.
Data will be continuously streamed and made available daily to users via TGS’ Wind AXIOM site evaluation and wind data analytics platform.
