You have a number of potential wind sites in your portfolio, and you’ve been trying relentlessly to identify the ones that will sail through planning without objections or delays.
You have been finding in practice that many wind sites face a number of aeronautical issues resulting in objections. These are the kinds that tend to be show stoppers or solvable, but with a huge amount of time and effort.
Imagine knowing which of your portfolio sites would have the least amount of aeronautical risk.
We understand aeronautical risk like few others, and have looked at hundreds of wind sites during the last 2 decades in over 15 countries. We often get requests to evaluate 10 – 30+ wind sites regarding aeronautical risks and prioritise them in order of lower risk. But how do we do it?
- Identify all the potential aeronautical issues (civil radar, military radar, radio navigation aids, airports and other). Having knowledge of where potential aeronautical issues are is of high importance. We make use of the Aviation Risk Assessment here.
- Undertake a technical assessment of the impact of a wind site to the aeronautical assets identified. This requires advanced software and technical information of the aeronautical assets.
- If there is a predicted technical impact could it be operationally acceptable? Sometimes this can be the case.
- Is there a cumulative impact to consider? More and more wind sites are becoming operational and cumulative concerns are continuously increasing.
- Can mitigation happen? If yes would it be time or cost effective and will not jeopardise the site’s viability?
- Assign an overall risk to the site. For example 1 being negligible and 6 being severe. Things that we do consider at this stage are what are the risks and whether these could be solved in practice.
- Identify the sites that issues are unlikely to be solved within the lifetime of the project.
- Rank the sites in order of lowest risk.
Why is this important today?
With financial and political uncertainties you don’t want to invest your time and money on sites that may never happen or even when these can happen will be financially not viable.
Our experience has shown that selecting sites that can happen at early stages can significantly increase the success rate of making a turbine happen.
What are your processes for determining the aeronautical risk of a site? we’d love to here them!
