Although not yet officially released IEC 61400‐12‐1 rev 2 is already being widely applied by many wind farm owners and operators. It is also a key part of the FGW TR6 wind power development guidelines which now permit remote sensing technologies to be used as stand-alone sources of wind data for projects in Germany.
The draft standard states that, at two different sites, a minimum of nine months of data from at least two different systems, should be compared over a variety of seasonal conditions to assess the sensitivity of the equipment to various environmental conditions. A total of 26 months of data from four AQ510 SoDARs, and co-located IEC compliant met masts ranging from 100m to 180 metres, have now been evaluated. In the same way that IEC 61400‐12‐1 rev 1 set the standard for the IEC compliant met towers so widely used in all applications today, rev 2 is likely to play a major role in increasing the acceptability of remote sensing as a primary data source for wind farm development purposes globally.
