Everyone knows Martha’s Vineyard is a very windy place, right? The “Saudi Arabia of wind,” to use the vogue cliche among the boosters of wind energy.

Wrong. And, thinks Tyler Studds, who is something of an expert on wind generation, that’s a most regrettable perception.

“The Island is not as windy as people think it is. And that’s unfortunate, because it means people have been trained to expect more than is possible,” said Mr. Studds, who last week won funding to help him determine exactly how windy Martha’s Vineyard actually is.

It seems a little odd, when you think about it, that for all the talk about using the wind to provide for the Island’s future energy needs, no one has actually accurately assessed the resource.

It’s a bit like promising an oil refinery before you’ve dug a well.

As Dave McGlinchey, executive director of the Vineyard Energy Project, which is mentoring and sponsoring Mr. Studds’ work, says: “A lot of conversations go on about what we should do, but a lot of it is really very uninformed.

“There’s no sense of whether you can even build wind turbines where some people are talking about them. And then, even if you are legally allowed to, there is no sense of whether there’s a good wind resource there.

“Until we have this tool that Tyler is developing, the conversation’s just a lot of talking,” Mr. McGlinchey said.

The “tool” Mr. Tyler is developing is a wind map.

Now, there already exist some wind maps, but, said Mr. Studds, a recent report suggests they may overestimate the available wind by as much as 10 or 20 per cent.

And while that might not sound like such a big margin of error, it is when you are talking about wind. As he explained, the amount of power available in wind is a cubic function of its speed. Thus a doubling in wind speed delivers an eight-fold increase in the available power.

So small inaccuracies in assessing the windiness of a particular site can make a big difference, particularly where the resource is marginal. You need an average wind speed of about 14 mph or more to make generation feasible, and large parts of the Island simply are not that windy.

There are other considerations too, of course, if the Island is ever to get seriously into large-scale generation, like the scope for inter-connectivity with the grid, habitat, transport, neighbors, aesthetics.

But before all that, logically, you need to know which places on the Island have enough wind. Or, more correctly, which places a couple of hundred feet above the Island have enough wind.

To date, working that out has been a process of educated guesswork and time-consuming measurement. You pick what seems like a suitable place, put up a big tower with some anemometers on it and wait for a year to see what they record.

But not for this project. Instead, Mr. Studds will use a new technology called light detection and ranging, or LiDAR, which works by sending a laser beam up into the air, and measuring the Doppler shift when it returns.

“Among the benefits of LiDAR,” he said, “is that it’s much quicker, and it’s portable, so you can assess a number of different sites throughout the year. And it’s more accurate because you can set the machine to read wind speed and direction at a precise height above the ground, exactly at the height of the turbine.”

The technology does not come cheap, however; the machines cost almost $170,000 each. There is only one now in the state, and it is fully booked, so the project will have to acquire another.

Everything always comes back to money. Mr. Studds’ Martha’s Vineyard Vision Fellowship, awarded every year to a Vineyard resident who wants to advance his or her education for the benefit of the Island, covers his costs in carrying out the wind mapping, but he’s still awaiting money for the rest.

“I’ve applied for federal funding for the LiDAR and the regional planning portion of the funds,” he said.

Yes, regional planning. Measuring the wind is the vital first step, but there’s much more to the process than that.

“More broadly it’s a cost-benefit analysis, to look at interconnection costs, habitat, transportation to the site, and then balancing everything else which is worth preserving here as well.

“It’s a new concept to the Island, regional utility scale wind generation,” he said. “I see myself as being the facilitator.”

To date, he has met with most of the Island’s planning boards and with the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.

The decision making will depend on them.

But once viable sites have been identified, it’s a matter of getting funds for the actual work through the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, which funds renewable energy development.

So there’s quite a way to go yet. But as Mr. McGlinchey of the VEP said, this project will provide a factual base for deliberations.

“We will at last be able to have these conversations as a community and have them be informed,” he said.