Consulting

Bird detection over water

Development of a bird migration monitoring concept for offshore wind farms

Sea Wind Management has developed a bird migration monitoring concept for the Baltic Eagle offshore project as part of its activity as the “Owner’s Engineer” in cooperation with OECOS GmbH. The priorities in this regard included automatic early detection of bird and bat activity, as well as the implementation of this information in the onshore control station to enable a shutdown of the wind farm or individual wind power plants. This is necessary on the one hand to meet the environmental requirements, and on the other hand to avoid excessively long wind farm downtimes.

Sufficient advance warning time to switch off the wind farm or individual wind power plants if necessary

The reason is that the licensing authorities will require the implementation of a bird migration monitoring concept in the future as part of the planning approval decisions. The state of the art for radar systems, camera systems and automatic rangefinders were compared in the study on the basis of a market study and the threshold values required to switch off the wind farm were elaborated or discussed from an environmental point of view. For the development of the monitoring concept, current research results on bird migration over the Baltic Sea and the behaviour of the birds in the presence of obstacles were evaluated and included in the concept development.