Wind Lidar Digitalization

Wind lidar technology has been increasingly used for wind energy applications for over a decade. During this time there has been an impressive development of a lidar community and widespread adoption of wind lidars. Lidars are becoming more robust, energy-efficient, smaller, and cheaper. However, this is not happening at the desired pace. 

Lidar technology still needs to be made user friendly to achieve a wider audience, but also quite “open” for power users. The e-WindLidar and OpenLidar initiatives have been tackling these seemingly opposing challenges through the auspice of IEA Wind Task 32. 

Since 2017 the e-WindLidar initiative has been pursuing the goal of including expert lidar knowledge in tools that will facilitate the application of lidar technology. The initiative yielded several open-source tools such as lidaco, the campaign-planning-tool and YADDUM which are respectively Python libraries for lidar data conversion, campaign planning and configuration, and single- and dual- Doppler uncertainty calculations.  

Since 2014 the OpenLidar initiative has been working on the development of the architecture of an open-source lidar that can be used for teaching, research, and product development. The core paradigm of the initiative is a modular lidar. We will briefly touch upon the OpenLidar architecture and present its practical implementation in a proof-of-concept drone-based wind lidar.

In this talk, we will present the contributions of DTU Wind Energy to both initiatives and suggest ways that they can be included in wind energy R&D activities.