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Wind Cube Uses Lasers To Verify Wind Speeds For Developers

Stephanie Murphy/WHOI

A laser-equipped white cube will soon provide offshore wind developers with the highly accurate data they need to attract financing for their projects.

Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are set to deploy the Wind Cube, a sophisticated instrument which uses lasers to record wind speed data. Three companies currently vying to develop offshore wind projects in leased Federal waters south of Martha’s Vineyard will use the data to help secure financing.

Bill White is Senior Director of Offshore Wind for the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, which funded the Wind Cube project with a $200,000 grant. He says potential backers want to see highly accurate wind data covering a year or so to give them a picture of how much wind a potential project might generate.

“The developers are looking to characterize the wind resource so they can get financing,” White said. “So the banks want to know, specifically, the resource. And so this data will be able to give the developer community an opportunity to understand exactly what that resource is, and it will help refine their bids.”

The Wind Cube is about the size of a portable refrigerator. It shoots invisible laser beams into the air to record wind speeds 10,000 times a second at heights ranging from 30 to 700 feet.

WHOI scientist Anthony Kirincich heads the Wind Cube project. He says the laser elements are housed inside the cube, and the beams shoot out from a circular opening at the top that’s protected by mirrored glass to reject sunlight. A single windshield wiper helps keep the glass clean.

“It’s an optical measurement, and so keeping that optical area clean is hugely important,” said Kirincich. “It measures how dirty the window is by itself, and then triggers the wiper on its own. But then, we could actually log in and trigger it to go if we wanted to. And it actually has a reservoir of wiper fluid that it uses, too.”

Despite its compact size - roughly 2 feet deep, 2 feet wide, and about 2 and a half feet high – Kirincich says the Wind Cube can measure the winds across the entire area of a large offshore turbine.

“An instrument like this allows you to get that measurement over the course of not only the middle of the turbine but from tip to tip as it’s moving around in a much more compact way than, say, going out and building a very large meteorological mass tower that goes up 100 meters, and trying to do a different way,” he said.

Kirincich and his team will deploy the wind cube on a tower about two miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, near the site of the three proposed wind projects.