Let's hear it for the buoys: why RPS Floating LiDAR is a long-running success

RPS’ floating LiDAR buoys offer world-leading measurement technology.

They provide highly accurate data to inform offshore wind farm development, for activities such as site selection, yield optimisation, array engineering and workplace safety. They have so far been deployed in the US, the UK, Europe, Australia and South Korea.

In 2021, our LiDAR buoys celebrated a big milestone: having collected six years of data. Their comms systems hadn't dropped a single 10-minute transmission. Their reliability means that our clients can expect successful acquisition of high-value continuous data, delivered on time.

The buoys’ success is down to excellent build quality, our team’s decades of metocean experience and their advanced design including remote intervention capabilities. They have achieved Stage 3 maturity certification from the Carbon Trust, qualifying them as fully commercial for the collection of bankable wind resource data at the highest level of buoy reliability and accuracy. Stage 3 is the highest level of accreditation, reflecting increasing certainty in the data collected.

This infographic explains a little more about the RPS LiDAR buoys, including what happened when two buoys deployed in 220m of water off South Korea took a direct hit from Typhoon Maysak in September 2020 (estimated to be an extreme, 50-year return period, storm event).