Canada prepares to open world’s most advanced wind lab

Globe & Mail : The Wind Engineering Energy Environment Research Institute (WindEEE), a $34 million laboratory near London, Ontario, will begin operations soon. Designed to produce a full range of three-dimensional wind effects ranging from a gentle breeze to downdrafts to tornadoes, it will be the most advanced facility for studying wind. The test chamber is a 25-m-diameter hexagon with 106 individually controlled fans and can draw up to 1.6 MW of electricity at maximum power. The facility will be used not just to study wind behavior in storms but to see how wind reacts to different terrains and the effect and effectiveness of different wind turbine arrangements.