AviTech Reader

Wind farm turbines have been established as a main method of harnessing wind energy in windy areas. However, among the most common hindrances to development of wind farms is the Doppler effect they create as they rotate leading to radar blackout zones. The main concern here is to develop hardware and software that can be used to detect turbines on radar systems and eliminate reference to them on radar displays.

Among companies that came up (and I remember this from a SAE aerospace magazine dated 23^rd December 2009) to deal with the effects include Raytheon Co. that was awarded a contract by UK’s national Air Traffic Services to do software modeling and field trials of technology that can minimize effects of wind turbines on radar signals in a bid to eliminate interference. The Raytheon approach includes advanced mitigation algorithms within the S-band approach and L-band en route primary surveillance radars. Testing was in U.K and Netherlands.

The problem just has to be solved because of the conflict between the national security, safety of passengers and the bid to promote use of alternative energy which are all good causes if I may comment on their importance. This again calls for collaboration between the various defense ministries or security agencies and the research organizations that propose or carry out the installation of the Wind energy stations.

Radar interference has become a very serious issue especially killing the visions of many industrial leaders and energy policy makers who are targeting wind energy productivity and its 20% contribution to the national power grid by 2030. What I would say is that, inter-agency co-operation, though encouraged by many are not the best solution because they will be very slow as it is quite hard to bring many people together for such processes of proposal evaluations. So the best way would be to hasten the development of technological solutions that would lead to diminution of  the effect of radar interference and make it less of a problem.