The difficult relationship between offshore wind and sea lions

Among the thousand problems to be solved when designing an offshore wind farm there is also the one you don't expect: the attack of a sea lion

He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him

I Sea lions they can be a danger for those who work in the industryoffshore wind. But they can also get hurt with the necessary equipment to measure the wind at sea. However, one company has found the solution to both problems.

Un leone marino adultor male can even weigh 300 kg and has a strength, and a mouth, capable of killing a man. He rarely attacks humans when he is ashore, but the sea is his kingdom and he tends to defend him.

And this is a problem not only for sailors, but also for offshore wind technicians and workers. AXYS Technologies is a Canadian company that often has to deal with this problem. A few years ago he developed an innovative good, called WindSentinel, which thanks to the technology and sensors it is padded with is able to reduce the cost of measuring currents and winds on the high seas.

This buoy has been successful in the wind sector, because it allows companies that want to build offshore wind farms to easily and at low cost measure all the parameters they need to understand if that is the right place to install an offshore park.

In these videos AXYS demonstrates how its WindSentinel works:

The AXYS buoy stays in the water for weeks and apparently is very popular with sea lions who use it as a rock for rest. But by doing so they put themselves at risk: the buoy is crammed with electrical equipment. Not to mention the damage done to a giant weighing three hundred kilos on a raft that houses technology for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Finally, when there is personnel on the buoy, the risks are also for the man. How to solve all these problems? With a cage, simple but effective solution.

It seems a simple, and quite homemade, plastic net but is not so. It is made of sufficiently robust materials from withstand an attack or a boarding of sea lions, without making the buoy too heavy. Buoy which, as seen in the photo, is powered with a solar panel which, thanks to the wide mesh of the net, continues to receive sun even with the protection.

Peppe Croce