Matthew Lackner

Director of Wind Energy Center and Endowed Chair in Renewable Energy University of Massachusetts Amherst

  • Amherst MA

Matthew Lackner studies offshore wind energy with a focus on the aerodynamics and structural control of floating offshore wind turbines.

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University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Expertise

Floating Offshore Wind Turbines
Renewable Energy Systems
Wind Turbines
Energy, Environment, and Water
Offshore wind power

Biography

As director of the Wind Energy Center at UMass Amherst, Matthew Lackner's research focuses on offshore wind energy with a particular concentration on the aerodynamics and structural control of floating offshore wind turbines.

He is also director of the NSF-funded ELEVATE: Elevating Equity Values in the Transition of the Energy System Ph.D. program at UMass Amherst that works to solve the technical, socioeconomic and climate challenges in energy transition.

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Education

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Ph.D.

Mechanical Engineering

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

M.S.

Aeronautics and Astronautics

Princeton University

B.S.E.

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (Minor: Physics)

Select Recent Media Coverage

Can Home Wind Turbines Take Off in the U.S.?

The Wall Street Journal  online

2024-11-07

Matthew Lackner is quoted in an article about small-scale wind energy. “With wind, bigger is better,” he says. “It makes no economic sense at a residential level … It would be like putting my solar under my deck.”

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Wind Power Without Giant Turbines? Some Startups Are Thinking Smaller and Quieter

The Wall Street Journal  online

2023-07-21

Matthew A. Lackner, director of the Wind Energy Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says some of these new technologies may end up generating only small amounts of electricity. Mounting small units atop buildings, he says, is just “nibbling around the edges” of the overall need for more wind power. “What we need is a massive rollout of the really good technology we already have,” Lackner says.

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Offshore Wind Energy Takes Root in Local Waters

Vineyard Gazette  online

2023-06-22

Ocean winds are much stronger and more consistent than those on land. And the waters off the Vineyard and Nantucket — sometimes dubbed the Saudi Arabia of wind – have been seen as one of the most promising areas to get turbines in the water and meet climate goals. Powerful winds of about 10 meters per second, relatively shallow waters and proximity to the east coast’s population centers make the location ideal, advocates say. “There’s nowhere on land that has winds speeds as high as offshore,” said Matthew Lackner, the director of the wind energy center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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Select Publications

Multi-objective optimization for an autonomous unmoored offshore wind energy system substructure

Applied Energy

2023

Autonomous unmoored floating offshore wind energy systems are an unconventional but promising technological solution to access the greatest wind resource in deep waters far offshore. This study proposes a trimaran substructure for such an autonomous unmoored system producing green hydrogen, named the Wind Trawler, which serves as both a power generation system and an energy transport vessel. Using a multi-objective optimization approach founded on the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), the principal geometric parameters of the trimaran substructure hulls (primary hull and two symmetrically-spaced equivalent outriggers) are optimized with respect to minimization of system steel mass and minimization of the average unit power consumption per unit generation.

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A New Methodology for Upscaling Semi-submersible Platforms for Floating Offshore Wind Turbines

Wind Energy Science Discussions

2023

This paper presents a new upscaling methodology for floating offshore wind turbine platforms. The size and power rating of offshore wind turbines have been growing in recent years, with modern wind turbines rated at 10–14 MW in contrast with 2–5 MW in 2010. It is not apparent how much further wind turbines can be increased before it is unjustified. Scaling relations are a useful method for analyzing wind turbine designs, to understand the mass, load, and cost increases with size. Scaling relations currently do not exist but are needed for floating offshore platforms to understand how the technical and economic development of floating offshore wind energy may develop with increasing turbine size. In this paper, a hydrodynamic model has been developed to capture the key platform response in pitch. The hydrodynamic model is validated using OpenFAST, a high-fidelity offshore wind turbine simulation software.

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How do floating wind turbines work? 5 companies just won the first US leases for building them off California’s coast

The Conversation

Matthew Lackner

2022-12-08

"How do floating wind turbines work? 5 companies just won the first US leases for building them off California’s coast"

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