Floating wind turbine developer Saitec Offshore Technologies is installing bird monitoring collision risk reduction system at its BlueSATH testing project, Saitec's first offshore wind deployment in Spain.
BlueSATH testing project will take place in real sea environment with the deployment of a 1:6 scaled prototype of a 10 MW wind turbine using SATH floating technology, an acronym of Swinging Around Twin Hull off Santander.
Saitec Offshore Technologies’ solution will have a bird monitoring collision risk reduction system, dubbed a key element to reducing and avoiding unwilling collisions with species like the European storm petrel (Hydrobates pelagicus) and the European shag (Palacrocorax aristotelis). It will also provide information about seabird behavior with the platform.
Per the company, as the European storm petrel is a nocturnal bird, the system will use thermal imaging cameras working 24/7 to track and detect its movement. Additionally, 3 more cameras will be installed to observe birds’ behavior. The information collected will be available on WildEye website https://www.wildeye.eu/
"Sardinero cove pre-operational environmental monitoring, carried out for more than a year by the Saitec team of ornithologists, will be studied together with the data given by these systems. The final findings will provide ecological information on the use of the cove by seabirds," Saitec said.
DTBird's main objective is to gather relevant data to improve SATH technology environmental design for future projects and commercial developments, Saitec said.
As for the BlueSATH project, the obtained results and findings will be applied in the following real-scale model (2MW), to be installed on the Basque Marine Energy Platform (BIMEP) in 2021.