Abstract Lidar-assisted wind turbine control is a promising technology and various concepts have been developed. This paper aims to add another concept to the list by describing how turbulence intensity can be estimated and used for controller scheduling to reduce structural loads. The turbulence intensity estimation is applied to lidar data from aero-elastic simulations and good agreement with the turbulence intensity calculation from wind fields is obtained. Further, a controller scheduling scheme is proposed to adjust the power level based on the estimated turbulence intensity. In a first simulation study, the scheduling scheme is able to reduce the power and extreme loads on the tower during severe turbulence conditions while keeping a similar level of power production and fatigue loads for normal turbulent conditions.