Tomorrow belongs to them

At Vortex, we try to tough sell our synthetic data but we do make an exception: students. We are almost always open to help students (and their teachers) if the reason for needing the data is properly justified. We consider this a matter of fairness, or maybe Karma.

We have all been students. Full of enthusiasm and with a hunger for knowledge. And we remember well those who helped us during our academic careers. Having been in their shoes is what encourages us to empathize with students and support them today.

As I mentioned in a previous post, modeled wind is not as good as measured wind and -for professional usage- the former must be complemented by the latter. However, modeling is much less expensive (in time and money terms) than measuring. For academic exercises, it’s acceptable to use merely modeled data and we are happy to help in that regard.

For example, every the 2nd year undergraduates of the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford make an amazing Field Trip to Tenerife full of interesting activities among which, measuring wind profiles using pilot balloon tracking accompanied by regularly released radiosondes. Due to the Covid-19, this year the field trip had to be cancelled but Vortex provided them with some “virtual” wind profiles for their project. Isn’t that an encouraging exercise of resiliency by the students?

At Vortex, we believe wind can -to some extent- be modeled but, moreover, we truly believe in Wind Energy helping the planet and we think that the easier it is for new generations to study this field, the better for all of us. That is an additional motivation for supporting student projects like the one at Oxford that will not provide us with any “direct profit”.

Of course, Karma works in circles and our altruist actions may benefit us in the future since a happy student today may develop into a nice customer tomorrow, but only very evil-minded individuals could really think we are doing this for egotistical reasons. Do you?

As Nelson Mandela’ said: “History will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday lives of children” Of course! since it will be the children of today that will write the history tomorrow…