Wind energy is about to become the leading electricity generating technology across Europe. In 2015, 43% of the electricity produced in Denmark came from wind energy. However, a massive increase in installed wind power capacity throughout Europe is still required to meet the political goals for this sustainable energy system. The energy system of the future must provide secure, affordable and climate-friendly energy, while at the same time creating new jobs and growth. Significant progress in lowering cost of energy (LCoE) has already been achieved, but there is still potential for cost reductions, through market development, research and innovation, for wind energy to reach its full potential. WindScanner is conceived as a new unique European distributed, mobile Research Infrastructure to provide the experimental data needed by the European wind energy’s research community for high-quality full-scale atmospheric measurements of the wind fields surroundings today’s huge wind turbines, wind farms, bridges, buildings, forests and mountains. The European WindScanner facility uses remote sensed wind measurements from space and time synchronized scanners to provide detailed wind field maps of the wind and turbulence conditions from the individual turbine scale to entire wind farms extending several kilometres. Via excessive data analysis WindScanner provides detailed inflow and wake measurements for validation and verification of wind turbine design and siting and for future optimisation of design making wind energy become cheaper and more reliable for the benefit of the society.

WindScanners generate very detailed and huge amounts of data, which are challenging for researchers and other users to analyse and interpret. Therefore, in the forthcoming years, the WindScanner data acquisition and post processing needs to become faster accessible to users and the scanned 3D wind velocity data interpretation less complex. The WindScanner infrastructure has its primary use within the fields of measurements around large wind turbines, on and off shore. However, it also serves other purposes such as atmospheric boundary layer research, air safety, wind loads on buildings and bridges, wind circulation in streets and the urban environment in general.