Golden State Wind, one of the companies with a lease offshore from San Simeon has plans to set two LIDAR-equipped research buoys inside its 80,000-acre lease site. Photo courtesy GSW
Golden State Wind, one of three companies holding leases for offshore floating wind farms off San Simeon, is moving forward with deployment of two specialized buoys in its lease site, to further along its scientific research into the project.
In a flyer the company produced that is available on its website, GSW said, “The metocean buoys will be located approximately 30 miles from shore.” It further says that GSW’s lease area sits some 22-miles offshore at the closest point, and 53-miles from Morro Bay.
Nautical chart shows the three lease sites in the Morro Bay Call Area. In the center is the site held by Golden State Wind, which is installing two LIDAR buoys to measure the atmospheric and sea conditions. Equinor has the lease site to the north of GSW’s, and Invenergy holds the lease on the southern-most site, which is also the closest to Morro Bay. Chart courtesy GSW
It’ll be out there for a couple of years. “The metocean buoys will collect data for a period of up to 24 months after placement,” the flyer said. “Upon completion of data collection, the metocean buoys will be decommissioned and all moorings, anchors and associated materials will be fully removed leaving no materials on the seabed.”
Metocean buoys monitor conditions both in the atmosphere and under water. The data will “include wind speed and direction at multiple heights, water currents, sea surface temperatures, and wave heights. Metocean buoys are used to collect accurate site-specific data to characterize the marine environment.”
The Call Area was divvied up in three roughly equal parts with Invenergy’s lease the southern-most, Golden State Wind in the center and Equinor on the north end and is the farthest away from Morro Bay and stretches the farthest out to sea.
A research company, TGS, was working to install a similar metocean buoy just south of the Invenergy lease site in an attempt to gather this same information and then sell it to the wind companies.
But its initial attempt to set the buoy went awry and they lost the anchor to the depths. They had been intending to retrieve the equipment and reset it and install the LIDAR-equipped buoy.
Though the company said it had no specific client for this, it was confident the data collected would be of great interest to all three, wind companies.
