Dutch wind farm developer Ecowende – a joint venture of Shell, Eneco and Chubu – will set a new ecological standard for building and operating offshore wind farms, with minimal impact on the natural habitat of birds, bats, marine mammals and underwater ecosystems. To do so, Ecowende is implementing advanced monitoring and mitigation technologies at their wind farm Hollandse Kust West.

In 2024, DHI biologists spent several nights at Denmark’s bat hotspots recording bats and birds in low light using advanced thermal cameras. The data will be used to train DHI’s multi-sensor bird detection application, MUSE AI, to automatically distinguish between bats and birds at night. This will eventually help to reduce bat collisions, and the DHI MUSE scientific team can create more detailed analyses and potentially discover unseen behavioural patterns of bats at night, ultimately helping to protect this vulnerable species group.

Once deployed at Hollandse Kust West, MUSE will help Ecowende protect bats and birds while meeting growing regulatory demands to manage collision risks to vulnerable species, thereby enabling more efficient offshore wind energy production.