Show notes
Antoine Larvol, CTO of Windar Photonics, discusses how their continuous wave LiDAR technology enhances wind turbine performance through optimization and monitoring, increasing AEP and reducing loads, particularly for legacy turbines.
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Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow.
Alright, we're here in Phoenix, a CP, clean power, uh, 2025. So I'm, uh. Sitting with Antoine Larvol from, he's a CTO from Windar. Yep. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Uh, we've been, uh, happy enough to get actually to sit inside your booth where it's nice and qui. Quiet and isn't it nice? Yeah. We got glass behind the camera here and people are walking by, walking by, walking by.
Um, so this morning, uh, we, we talked yesterday a little bit about what wind photonics does. Yep. Of course, from our, uh, some of our other friends around the world. We've heard about some, some campaigns you've done in the United States, which have been. Really successful. So yeah, congrat good. Congratulations there.
Yeah, thank you. Um, and, and as, as a lot of things in the wind industry, Windar, photonics based in Denmark.
Antoine Larvol: Yeah.
Joel Saxum: So you guys, uh, bring it, bring in that Danish [00:01:00]technology. We're here, of course, bringing it to the US market at a CP, the American Clean Power Show. So welcome to the States. Thank you. Um, it's a short one, but a
Antoine Larvol: good one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Joel Saxum: exactly. So, so I want to talk a little bit about what Windar photonics and, and it is a LIDAR based sensor, correct?
Antoine Larvol: Yes. Right. So. We do continuous wave base, uh, lidar. Yep. Uh, main product is a two beam version mm-hmm. Where you shoot, uh, at 80 meters in front of the turbine. Mm-hmm. And you basically alternate from one beam to the other.
And measure wind speed and direction upfront, the, the turbine among others.
Joel Saxum: Right. So we're talking about, uh, if you, if you're in the wind industry, you've ever seen these lidar units that are put actually, you're the cell mounted, correct? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So, and, and, uh, we're looking more on the optimization, retrofit monitoring side of things.
Yeah,
Antoine Larvol: exactly. So we've never been a resource assessment company. Yeah. Or we don't look at power curve verification and stuff like that. We really [00:02:00] focus on. Retrofitting those, existing turbines. And then add value to In terms of information to, the customer, Yeah. With the mon monitoring side of things.
Yeah. And, from day one, that's been the goal of Windar Making something cheap, robust. That can just stay there and measure with good availability, wind speed, and direction coming to your turbine.
Joel Saxum: I love it. so we wanna squeeze as much as we can outta these turbines. And you guys are increasing AEP that's, the name of the game.
Yeah. Right.
Increasing AEP below rated. and then above rated you decrease loads. Increase uptime. and we basically do that by going on the line of the wind direction. that you then feed to the turbine controller and then we can actually adjust the, yaw position of the turbine according to our information.
So I want to talk a little bit, we, we chatted a little bit offline about the, technology behind it, right? Yep. And people in the wind industry, if you're around the wind industry around resourcing or you're around optimization, you've heard [00:03:00] lidar. Yep. You know what I mean? And, but I don't think.
A lot of people know exactly what lidar, what it does, how it does it. Yeah. What is the technical, where's the magic coming from? Exactly. It's just a black box. It's just a, technically, I guess it's just a white box. Yeah. For the wind photonics. But how do, how does the lidar work to measure actual wind speed coming into the turbine?
Antoine Larvol: Yeah,
Joel Saxum: so
Antoine Larvol: we basically focus laser light, and we do a focus point at 80 meters in front of the turbine. And basically there where your light concentrates on a specific location, then you hit particles in the air, pollen, water droplets, dust, whatever. Dust. Yeah. Okay. Whatever is there. And then you will, have a certain frequency of the light you emit, and that will just bounce on those particles and come back with a slight shift in frequency.
And that's doppler shift. And then. Analyzing this shift, then you can derive a wind speed along the beam Of, the, [00:04:00] lidar.
Joel Saxum: So
Antoine Larvol: we're
Joel Saxum: talking about like a bunch of really, really smart trigonometry kind of
Antoine Larvol: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you have a bit of optics. Yeah. Trigonometry. Uh, and, uh, yeah, it's a bunch of optics.
Hardware, uh, software. A lot of software. A lot of software, yeah. Uh, to analyze that and squeeze as much info out of this. Right. We do, uh, you can derive wind speed, wind direction. You can look at turbulence. Mm-hmm. You can, uh, detect our wake, uh, is going on. So you can actually detect whether or not your turbine is in the wake.
Uh, and then based on that, then you will do different ing strategy in order to make the most of your turbine. Right. Decrease loads or increase, uh, outputs.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. So and mean. That's what, uh, the uptime podcast we're here about. When we bring technology, we talk to. Smart people like yourself, Antoine. Thank you.
We, we want to pick the, pick out the solutions, right? Like what, how are you guys helping the wind industry? And that's the important thing here. So we've [00:05:00] talked about two, basically, kind of two tracks that you guys go down and one of 'em is optimization. Yep. And one of 'em is monitoring.
Antoine Larvol: Yep.
Joel Saxum: So let's, let's start with optimization.
What does that look like from wind?
Antoine Larvol: Yeah, I mean that's a bit the unique part of wind. Uh, so we do lidar, uh, but actually the. Like this good selling product is this, uh, wind technology. So basically what it does is that we go on the line of the wind direction, uh, of the sensors from the primary secondary sensor from the turbine, and then we go on that line, read this info that they are measuring, and then, uh, correct this info according to our measurements.
Ah, okay. What's going on out there is that, you know, those, uh, devices are placed behind the rotr. So they're basically, uh, biased by the blades, basically turning in front and creating a lot of turbulence. You also, you have some effects depending on the, your misalignment of the turbine. And so basically you don't have a great [00:06:00] measurement from, from those devices.
So what we bring is that, right. We measure upfront, so we are unbiased and then modify, the information, the wind direction information, and then feed that to the turbine controller so we can actually, yo. The turbine the way we want.
Joel Saxum: So in a really simple way, you guys are creating what is an amazing wind speed and direction sensor.
Antoine Larvol: Yeah. So for this WindTIMIZER we only use wind direction information. And then basically improve what the turbine is given as information about. Relative wind direction of the nacelle Right. So yaw error. and then we correct that. So we increase, energy production below rated wind speed.
And then we have different strategies above rated wind speeds, aiming at reducing loads and increasing uptime. So the way we do that is actually we introduce small yaw misalignment, depending on wind [00:07:00] speed, in order to achieve that. Especially decreased loads on, blades.
Yeah. and the drive train rate.
Joel Saxum: So in, let's, talk a case study, right? We wanna, we always want to give examples, right? Yeah. So, so in the states we had, we talked about you guys are focusing on more, well not globally really, but you're focusing on more of like the last generation of turbines, not the brand new ones.
Antoine Larvol: Yeah. So we are like really focusing at the moment on all this generation of. G 1, 15, 16. Two three. Yeah. 87 97 V 80, V 82. V 90, uh, seven, uh, maybe 2 92. Okay. Like this kind of turbines. Yeah. Uh, that's been not there for, for a while. And basically where you don't have a lot of offering on how to squeeze more power.
And they're not supported anymore by manufacturers, right? Yeah. Uh, so that's where we come in and offer that to. To be able [00:08:00] to, to produce more power, decrease load. Right. So the way we do that, usually when, uh, a new customer approach us is that you will do a deployment of like five units in a, in the farm.
Mm-hmm. Uh, basically pick randomly, uh, if, uh, five turbines and then we will install, uh, technology. You install like in three, four hours you're done with installing the system. Oh, nice. On the tripod. Uh, wire that to the turbine controller. And then, uh, you will start this toggling campaign. So what we do is that we turn on the technology for 70 minutes and then turn it off 70 minutes.
This way you have a slight shift over of the period over the day. Mm-hmm. So you don't always hit exactly the same time. So in case there's, you know, any effect, recurring effect, and you go away from that, and then you will do this toggling on and off for like a period of like three, four months, depending on wind conditions.
And once you have like enough data on every wind, wind. You will analyze, uh,