May 24, 2010
Building a virtual wind farm
John Hecklau, principal at Environmental Design & Research in Syracuse, N.Y., has been providing visual simulations for proposed wind farms since 1999.
Deepwater Wind contracted EDR to provide the computer-generated images of the proposed Block Island farm. The company has been in the trenches of offshore wind for some time; it provided the first visual simulations for Cape Wind nine years ago.
Hecklau says that the early land-based wind farms were “warmly received,” by the public, but controversy has dogged each successive project, especially in the Northeast. Nowadays, there’s “not an easy project anymore in the Northeast. Every project, some opposition.” Projects in the Midwest, he says, receive much less opposition.
In his experience, while there are a variety of reasons given for the opposition, “it boils down that people don’t want to see them.”
How’s it done
According to Hecklau, the developer provides the coordinates of the proposed farm, then the specifications of the turbines themselves — height, dimensions, colors. In the case of the Block Island farm, there was a foundation detail as well. The company utilized software to create a digital rendering of the turbine. Meanwhile, photographers visited the island and took photos from various locations with certain criteria in mind: open views toward the site ideally containing “alignment features,” such as houses, silos, etc., to create the model. Read more…
