Natural Power has spun off a smart turbine curtailment technology in the US, developed to reduce bat collisions and fatalities.
EchoSense is US Fish and Wildlife Service-approved and provides an alternative to the high energy losses associated with blanket curtailment.
The system limits bat fatalities at wind farms while simultaneously reducing curtailment hours and associated energy losses when compared to a blanket curtailment strategy
Kevin Denman, managing director, and commercial lead on this project, said: “The formation of EchoSense, LLC is an exciting next step in the growth of EchoSense.
“Increased market demand for advanced curtailment solutions such as EchoSense, and the unique challenges associated with implementing them, require a team and business built specifically for that purpose.
“Recognizing this need, Natural Power created EchoSense, LLC to enable the next phase of our growth and to better serve our clients.”
Denman said multiple studies now exist that show the efficacy of EchoSense as a more cost-effective alternative to a blanket curtailment strategy for minimisation of bat fatalities.
“These, along with multiple years of full commercial operation on projects permitted by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, demonstrate that it is possible to protect bat populations while also reducing the sometimes substantial energy losses previously associated with the standard approach,” he added.
EchoSense maintains a reduction in bat fatalities comparable to a blanket curtailment strategy while giving back approximately 40-60% of energy production that would otherwise be lost under blanket curtailment methods.
The EchoSense technology comprises a detection subsystem, which collects bat acoustic and environmental data, and a decision subsystem, which processes data against a predetermined rule set and issues commands to curtail or release turbines.
Meteorological data is collected on every turbine and processed against highly configurable bat protection rules for each turbine.
Curtailment commands are issued to individual turbines.
Presence of bats can be aggregated site-wide or by predefined zones (based on data driven approach) allowing optimisation for bat activity and habitat use of individual sites.
Nacelles that are instrumented for acoustic data collection are fitted with microphones mounted on brackets on the top of the nacelle, and a bat detector within the nacelle.
The bat detector sends data through the project network to the EchoSense server located onsite which processes the data and executes farm-level control.
The system is engineered to ensure durability of components, NERC CIP compliant network security, and minimal, simple and safe periodic maintenance.
Bat activity avoidance and associated energy losses can be calculated for different strategies using onsite acoustic and meteorological data.
This analysis can then be used to calculate conservation benefits and return on investment of multiple curtailment scenarios.
EchoSense can assist with collection of onsite acoustic data if it is not available.