Development projects for wind farms in offshore areas, where the wind is most reliable and the demand for electricity is the highest, have met with massive local resistance due to the esthetics of the windmills themselves. I wanted to explore if it was possible to disguise the visual impact of these offshore wind farms, making them more palatable to locals.

I thought I could illuminate the silhouette of the windmill as seen from the shore, so as to have it blend into the environment around it. Since the windmill is so small on the horizon, I didn’t have to worry about color matching it, just brightness matching, since our eyes are worse at identifying colors at a distance. I built a 5’ tall scale windmill, covered it in LEDs, and brought it to the beach to test it out.

After creating this prototype I was contacted by wind farm projects in the Netherlands and Maine to explore further larger scale testing.