Wind Farm Turbine Height Drone Inspection

Drones are an obvious choice for inspecting large wind turbines, which is why we have done a few of them in the past.

A drone can be used to inspect the full length of the tower, all the way up to the gearbox and generator nacelle, hub and rotor blades that are otherwise very difficult to inspect once installed.

However, this job was a bit different, a first for us actually. The owner of the wind farm power generation plant wanted to install some new wind turbines in adjacent fields at different elevations and needed to know if an RAF early warning radar about 7 miles away could be seen from the planned height of the new turbines. The reason for this is if we can see the radar the radar can see us, and the turbine blades would show up on their scopes and interfere with operations, so proof was needed that tests had been done to mitigate this.

We used a drone with a good zoom lens that could easily see the radar dome 7 miles away and slowly lowered altitude above various locations until the radar dome disappeared from view behind hills in Yorkshire. We were able to superimpose the height data onto video clips and images, as well as map locations, so the client could see the best place to construct new wind turbines as well as places where they couldn’t out them.