We're standing on top of one of the two DOE owned buoys that we have recently purchased for the purpose of acquiring information in our offshore wind areas across the U.S.

It is a large vessel. It's about 20 feet in total length and it's quite large for a variety of reasons. It's meant to operate autonomously in the water for a significant period of time and it's actually carrying a lot of instrumentation within it.

One of the key instruments that we have on top of this buoy is this LIDAR device right here. The LiDAR is important for us because it provides high resolution information such as wind speed and wind direction at hundreds of feet. It can provide information at discrete elevations which allows us to have higher confidence on what is the actual wind speeds that we could see that the wind turbine itself will be actually experiencing. This is really important for us in order to maximize the energy capture of the machine as well as understand the impacts of that resource in terms of reliability, operations and other key conditions for the particular design of that wind plant.

In addition to that LiDAR, we have more traditional atmosphere instruments. As you will see from the mast, we have a traditional cup, we have a vein as well as a temperature sensor. The mast also carries a series of key instrumentations that provides GPS so we know where the buoy is actually positioned, as well as a communications antennae that allows us to really transfer the information being recorded at buoy to a near shore site where the data can then be analyzed.

In order to act autonomously, this buoy is equipped with two renewable options. First you will see it is equipped with two photovoltaic panels. Each one of them are 220 watts as well as a 1.1 kilowatt, 1.6 metered rotor wind turbine. Between these two technologies as well as the on board generator, we have the ability to operate in the ocean for several months without any human participation.

On the deck we have a series hatches which lead to four distinct compartments in the buoy. In compartment four we have a generator, compartment three we have the fuel tank for the generator, in compartment two and one we actually house all the critical information and the sensors that are actually capturing all the information in the buoy. Why don't we take a look inside real quick? Within this compartment there is a series of different instrumentations. Specifically this black box in front you, the black box is an accelerometer. The reason the accelerometer is important is because it allows you to really resolve the wave conditions that the actually buoy is experiencing. This is important because we actually understand everything from wave heights, extreme conditions, etc. Again, these are the kinds of information we need to drive and understand what the offshore wind facility will look like in the future.

What we are trying to do is really understand the resource for offshore wind deployment so we are really trying to capture the type of information so we can do micro-siting of potential future wind plants. The better you know the resource, i.e. how good the wind speeds are, how are the meta-ocean conditions such as the wave heights etc. the better you can design a future offshore wind plant and the more energy you can capture from that particular site.