The Rave research initiative in Germany is celebrating 10 years of continuous activity at the country’s first offshore wind farm.
The Alpha Ventus project was inaugurated in spring 2010, and, as well as operating as a commercial wind farm, it also functions as a research platform for the further development of the offshore wind energy sector.
Rave (Research at Alpha Ventus) has been collecting measurements at the wind farm with a range of measuring technology.
It has also been working on a wide variety of research projects since the project opened.
After 10 years, the results are uniformly positive, said the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy Systems (IWES), which coordinates Rave.
The unique dataset compiled in Rave has now been included in a database run by the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency and is available to all the researchers helping to drive forward the offshore wind energy sector.
Fraunhofer IWES director for wind farm development Bernhard Lange said: “Whereas 10 years ago the major concern was whether offshore wind energy was even a viable option in Germany, we are now focusing on optimising the technology and cutting costs even further.”
It is not merely the duration of the time series but also the scope of the measurements which make the data so unique, Fraunhofer IWES said.
“At times, there were more than 1200 measuring channels operating simultaneously, generating more than 30 TB of data,” it added.
The measurement campaigns in Rave are ongoing, meaning the data pool will also continue to expand.
Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency head of the mobile and stationary measurements section and project manager Kai Herklotz said: “As the archive is operated by a federal authority, data management and access to the data will also be guaranteed far into the future.”