Company Profile

Second Wind’s mission is to advance the use of wind data to make wind energy profitable for the businesses and investors who create wind energy plants, painless for the operators who work with wind energy equipment and practical for the businesses, consumers and utilities that benefit from wind energy as a low-cost and environmentally desirable source of power.

Second Wind prides itself on technology innovation with its in-house hardware development and software engineering talent. The company continues to develop ground breaking products related to wind data.

Key Products
Walter Sass, President                                 
Ken Cohn, Operations Manager
Susan Giordano, General Manager

A total of 30 employees staff Second Wind’s headquarters and manufacturing facility, with an industry-wide reputation for innovative, reliable technology and excellent customer support. Inc. magazine recently ranked Second Wind on its first-ever Inc. 5,000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the country. The company’s ranking was based on its 27% revenue growth from 2003-2006 and was the only business-to-business wind organization in the energy industry category. In December 2007, Second Wind secured $4 million in second round financing from Good Energies, a leading global investor in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industry.

History
Second Wind was founded in 1980 by Walter Sass and Kenneth Cohn. Sass and Cohn – engineers who have been friends since grade school – decided the emerging field of wind energy would provide an opportunity for them to leverage their engineering skills to benefit the environment. They recognized that for wind energy to take off, the industry needed more than wind turbines. Wind developers also needed software and hardware that would help them to measure wind accurately at prospective sites, and monitor successful turbine performance at established wind farms. The company’s first headquarters was the spare bedroom in Sass’s home.

Second Wind has maintained a presence in wind resource assessment since introducing the first data logger specifically for wind energy prospecting in 1981. In 1985, the company tackled wind farm monitoring with the introduction of the first Second Wind wind farm monitoring system. In 2007, Second Wind took another step forward by launching the Triton™ sonic wind profiler, designed to re-invent sodar for wind profiling.

Key Products
Triton™ Sonic Wind Profiler re-invents sodar technology for wind assessment. It captures accurate wind data from any height, in any weather, at any location, without being attended. Readings look like anemometry results, with no expert analysis required.

Nomad® 2 data logger is a reliable tool for acquiring data from up to 12 anemometers and up to 8 wind vanes, temperature sensors, or other meteorological devices. Thousands of Nomad 2s are in service at sites as diverse as Antarctica and Sub-Saharan Africa. Nomad 2s feature advanced operation, low power consumption, field reprogammability, and Windows™-compatible compact flash cards for data storage.

The C3 anemometer measures the wind speed with confidence. This 3-cup anemometer is designed for durability and reliability, with new materials and a manufacturing process that is RoHS-compliant, involving no toxic metals. Available calibrated (model C3) or uncalibrated (model C3C).

SkyServe^SM satellite wind data service provides reliable data transmission from remote locations, using the Globalstar satellite network. Bundled with the Triton profiler or the NOMAD 2 data logger, SkyServe combines weather data with precise GPS time/location stamps.

Phaser® digital power transducer is a highly accurate instrument for three-phase electric power measurement. Inexpensive enough to replace analog transducers, the Phaser is easy to use, from basic metering configuration to output signal scaling. The Phaser measures each phase voltage and current over ten thousand times per second.

Markets Served
Second Wind has a sales force in North America along with resellers in Europe and Asia. Products are placed in more than 40 countries and on all seven continents, including Antarctica.

Company Milestones
1980 – Second Wind begins operations.

1981 – The AL-2000 data logger, the company’s first product is introduced.

1985 – Sass and Cohn identified a need in the industry for a monitoring system for wind farms that would allow the customer to view a collection of turbines as a single power plant. This system was quickly adopted by leading wind energy developers in the United States.

1991 – The Nomad 1 was introduced.

1994 – Second Wind won a research contract from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to develop a next-generation wind farm monitoring system, the Advanced Distributed Monitoring System (ADMS).

1997 – The company won its first contract to provide Florida Power & Light with Phaser power transducers, used in distribution automation. This marked the company’s successful diversification from wind power generation monitoring into substation automation. Phasers now equip substations throughout FPL’s entire service territory.

2003 – The Nomad 2 data logger was released for wind energy resource assessment.

2004 – Second Wind and the ADMS recognized by the American Wind Energy Association with a Technical Achievement Award.

2005 – Second Wind celebrates 25 years as a leader in providing electronics and software to the wind energy industry.

2007 – The Triton sonic wind profiler and SkyServe satellite service introduced.