Orsted is to share data from the 210MW Westermost Rough offshore wind farm off the east coast of England with technical universities.
The aim is to “further improve wind farm design and inspire future engineers to join the green energy industry”, the Danish energy giant said.
Westermost Rough consists of 35 Siemens Gamesa 6MW machines with 154-metre rotor spans and has been operational since 2015.
The data set covers two years of SCADA signals – electrical power, rotor speed, pitch angle, yaw position, yaw misalignment and nacelle wind speed – as well as ground-based lidar and buoy data.
Orsted has already shared data with universities from the Horns Rev 1 and Anholt offshore wind farms, which feature 2MW and 3.6MW hardware respectively.
But as “wind farms and wind turbines are increasing in size, models need to be validated and tested against production data from a new generation of wind turbines with larger rotor spans”, the company said.
The institutions to receive the new data are: Technical University of Denmark; University of Delaware; ETH Zurich; University of Southern Denmark; National University of Singapore; City University of Hong Kong; University of Brunei Darussalam; and University of Bergen.
Orsted head of wind power R&D Christina Aabo said: “Universities are key partners for us as they have the necessary long-term view to carry out primary research which can lead to new models and designs.
“By sharing data from Westermost Rough with universities, we wish to give them the opportunity to validate and develop models based on real production data from the current technology platform.”
DTU Wind Energy senior scientist Charlotte Bay Hasager said: “We wish to increase our understanding of offshore winds and wind farm wakes through modelling and satellite data.
“The data from Anholt offshore wind farm have been instrumental to our research and have led to three peer-reviewed scientific articles.”