The Peenestrom is a 20-kilometer river that connects the Szczecin lagoon with the Baltic Sea. The existing leading light system was getting old and very expensive to maintain. Each leading light system required a pair of lights, sometimes several hundred meters apart. You practically needed a small house to hold all the equipment for them to run and needed to lay hard communication wires between the two lights.

Introducing Webscada through a wireless GSM network simplified the system tremendously by removing the physical communication lines. The physical footprint required to run the system was drastically reduced by a factor of 10 by introducing the compact solar power system. And in fact, the system we installed in 2004 is still in use today.

The second innovation was establishing the Seezeichen Service, or sea marking services. At the time, private harbors were responsible for installing and maintaining their aids to navigation and were generally dependent on the authorities.

We purchased a boat and started with 30 buoys on a leasing model, offering a complete package for installing and maintaining the buoys for private harbors. We also introduced PE buoys for the first time in Germany. The fact that a private company could manage private aids to navigation was a completely new concept.

Thirdly, the development of the SC155 was an important innovation. Up until this point, small and medium buoys in Germany still used gas lanterns. There was no way to monitor them, and you constantly had to service the buoys to replace the gas canisters.

The introduction of a solarpowered self-contained lantern improved the service life cycle while concurrently reducing risk. An important add-on option was adding a modem that enabled remote Web SCADA monitoring on important waterways. Something that couldn’t be done previously.

We learned an amazing amount during those initial projects. Marking offshore windfarms is not the same as marking waterways. The needs are distinctly different. Windfarms need multiple products that are easy to install, easy to commission, and easily scalable as size and turbine numbers increase.

Again, we decided to focus. There was no one else in the world giving serious thought to offshore wind and its potential. We therefore developed a line of products specifically for offshore wind… the Original NAi range.