HiDef Aerial Surveying Limited (HiDef) is pleased to announce the agreement of a further year’s contract to deliver high-resolution digital video aerial survey services to Centrica Energy’s Lincs Wind Farm. Lincs is a joint venture between leading UK energy company Centrica Energy, offshore wind market leader DONG Energy and Siemens Project Ventures.
HiDef has delivered ornithological and marine mammal survey services to Centrica across its portfolio of offshore wind projects and this contract is the latest phase in that partnership. The survey’s design was driven by the results of a statistical power analysis undertaken by HiDef’s project partner, DMP Stats, based at the University of St. Andrews. The first year of post-construction monitoring of the Lincs site has already yielded some important results and has demonstrated both the effectiveness of the HiDef technique and the benefits of adopting a strategic-level approach to environmental monitoring.
Kit Hawkins, HiDef’s Commercial Director, announced this week:
“We are pleased to have agreed a further year’s contract to deliver services to Lincs Wind Farm Limited, as this underlines the quality of our product and the high regard in which our clients hold our services. Centrica is one of our longest standing project partners and one with whom we share key goals and standards.
HiDef and Centrica have set the industry standard for both survey and reporting, with the statutory bodies having provided copies of our latest Lincs report to other renewable energy developers as an example of industry leading best practise.”
Jennifer Snowball, Consents and Environment Manager at Centrica Energy, continued:
“HiDef and Centrica have been working collaboratively for a number of years. We are delighted to see that our efforts to find new ways of working are already yielding meaningful and robust scientific results.
The results to date indicate that the impact to sea bird communities from offshore wind farm development is comparable with the predictions made in the impact assessment, whilst revealing some important natural fluctuations in distribution and relative abundance which, using a different survey method may not have been.
