Vestas joins DOE, Texas Tech to break ground on unique wind energy research facility

The never-ending push to improve the fundamentals of wind turbines, which have become many times stronger and more efficient through the years, continues.

The Department of Energy and Vestas Wind Systems last week joined with Sandia National Laboratories and Texas Tech University to break ground on a new state-of-the-art wind turbine test facility in Lubbock, Texas, that will focus on how turbines at wind farms affect one another.

The Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) facility is the first public facility of its kind in the world to use multiple wind turbines to measure how wind turbine wakes interact with one another at a wind farm. Administration officials linked the groundbreaking to President Obama’s