Posters

Abstract

Offshore wind energy is well-established in Europe and Asia is poised for rapid growth in waters of the Americas. Understanding the potential magnitude of bird and bat collisions at offshore wind farms is an important factor for regulators, and assessing these impacts is challenging given harsh offshore conditions and the inability to conduct standardized carcass searches similar to land-based turbines. While European regulators have relied on collision risk models to predict operational effects of offshore wind development, U.S. regulators have not accepted collision model predictions. Therefore, development of automated collision monitoring technologies to measure collision is an important factor in advancing offshore wind energy in the U.S. market. Automated monitoring systems can also identify the specific time when collisions occur, which is vital information to develop predictive curtailment strategies to minimized future mortality from wind energy. To support this need, WEST is leading a collaboration with the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to advance an automated, multi-sensor system for detecting and quantifying bird and bat collisions at offshore wind turbines. The effort improves TNO's existing WT-Bird® system that detected large bird collisions during the daytime at the Offshore Wind Farm Egmond aan Zee (OWEZ) in the Netherlands.