About WEC
The The Wind Energy and Control (WEC) Group is a research group at the University of Strathclyde focused on advancing wind energy technology from concept to deployment. We combine validated modelling, advanced control, reliability engineering and experimental validation to produce decision-ready evidence for industry and research partners — with a particular strength in novel wind turbine concepts.
How to think about WEC: we act as an academic pitstop to de-risk wind technology. Bring us the hard part — the uncertainty — and we’ll help you turn it into evidence.
Who we are
WEC brings together expertise in wind turbine and wind farm control, modelling and simulation, optimisation, power systems integration, condition monitoring and reliability — supported by experimental and rapid prototyping capability through the MERINO Lab.
- Research: turbine dynamics, farm-level control, wake interaction, grid support and reliability.
- Methods: validated models, loads analysis, controller design, digital twins, experimental validation.
- Translation: independent technical due diligence, risk registers, and scale-up roadmaps.
We’re comfortable being technical. When we present work, we talk in terms of control architectures, dynamic response, load spectra, wake interactions, and validation — because credibility in wind requires engineering detail.
Where we are
History & heritage
WEC’s roots go back further than the group’s current name. The Wind Energy and Control (WEC) Group is the present-day face of a control engineering tradition at Strathclyde stretching back over four decades — one that produced internationally-used textbooks, a spin-out company, and, eventually, one of the UK’s largest university wind energy research groups.
The Industrial Control Centre (1981)
In 1981, Professor Michael Grimble founded the Industrial Control Centre (ICC) within Strathclyde’s Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering. Over the following decades the ICC became a significant international name in industrial and robust control, producing widely-used textbooks (including Robust Industrial Control Systems and Industrial Control Systems Design), co-editing Springer’s long-running Advances in Industrial Control book series, and spinning out Industrial Systems and Control Ltd — still active decades later.
The wind energy stream grows (1988–2010s)
Professor Bill Leithead established a wind energy research stream within the ICC in 1988. Over the next two decades this strand grew substantially, chairing the UK’s Supergen Wind Hub and hosting Strathclyde’s first EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Wind Energy Systems — with Leithead going on to serve as the ICC’s Director himself, carrying its control engineering rigour directly into wind.
Today: the WEC Group
As the wind energy stream grew into the department’s largest and most externally active research group, it took on its own identity as the Wind Energy and Control (WEC) Group — now led by Professor James Carroll and Professor Olimpo Anaya-Lara, and carrying forward the same applied, industry-facing control engineering ethos the ICC was built on.
Why this matters: in modern wind, performance claims without validation pathways are cheap. WEC focuses on methods and evidence that allow novel ideas to survive real-world scrutiny — a discipline inherited directly from the ICC’s own decades of industrial control practice.
It’s easy to undersell how far a research group has come when its history isn’t visible anywhere. Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the ICC’s original website is still out there — frozen exactly as it looked in April 2001.
Visit the original ICC website →Opens the real archived page in a new tab, exactly as the Wayback Machine preserved it.
Bring your hardest wind problem.
If you’re developing a new turbine concept, a wind plant controller, or a grid integration strategy, we can help you define the key uncertainties, design the right validation plan, and generate credible engineering evidence.
© The Wind Energy and Control (WEC) Group · University of Strathclyde · Royal College Building, Room 3.10 · 204 George Street, Glasgow, G1 1XW