Samothraki is a small island in the north-east Aegean with a 1,611-metre mountain in the middle of it — the highest peak of any Greek island. We pulled the public wind and solar record for it, and the interesting part is not the number we found. It is the month we had to throw away.
Where this is.
Twenty-odd nautical miles off the Thracian coast, with the Turkish island of Gökçeada to the east and Límnos to the south-west. Kamariotissa on the west shore is the ferry port and effectively the island’s front door. It matters for wind that the island is small, steep and surrounded by open water on every side: there is no long fetch of land to slow the air down before it arrives, and a mountain that size makes its own weather on the way past.
A locator, not a survey. The coastline is Natural Earth 1:50m, which renders this island as a seven-sided blob — enough to show which water it sits in, and no more.
What the wind actually does here.
Not what you would guess. The windiest month in the typical year is February, and the second peak is autumn — October and November. The calm months are May and June. That is not the northern European pattern, where the windy half and the dark half of the year line up neatly; the Aegean has its own shape, and the summer lull sits right in the middle of the tourist season.
Across the eleven months we could use, the mean wind speed at ten metres is about 5.7 m/s. Eighty-seven per cent of hours are at or above 2 m/s, which is where the low-wind blade set on an Atlas starts turning. Sixty-two per cent of hours are above 4 m/s and a quarter are above 8. Those are good numbers by any standard, and they are the reason islands like this one come up in our inbox more often than their population would suggest.
Sun and wind for the same location. The empty slot in December is not a rendering fault.
The month we cannot show you.
December is missing from the wind series because the data for it is broken. In the typical year for this grid cell, 477 of December’s 744 hourly wind values are pinned at exactly 37.79 metres per second — the same number, hour after hour, for nearly two thirds of the month. That is a stuck value in a dataset, not a storm. No island in the Aegean sustains hurricane-force wind for three weeks.
Left in, it would have dragged the annual average from 5.7 m/s to 7.6 and made this island look a third windier than it is. That is the kind of error that flatters a turbine seller, which is exactly why it is worth saying out loud. We checked every month the same way — in the eleven we kept, the single most common wind value accounts for under 3.2 per cent of hours, which is what real weather looks like.
A number that makes your product look better is the one you should check twice.
Why sun and wind are worth having together here.
Samothraki gets a lot of sun: about 1,664 kWh per square metre a year, which is roughly double what northern Britain sees. But the shape of the year still bites. December sunlight is a fifth of July’s, November barely better — and November is one of the windiest months on the island. The two sources are out of phase, which is the entire practical argument for running both rather than doubling down on one.
That is also why the Atlas body carries inputs for wind and solar on the same panel and a single output to the battery. Not because combining them is clever, but because on a site like this one they genuinely fail at different times of year.
The Atlas as it ships. This is our own product photograph, not a picture of one installed on Samothraki.
One number, twenty-two kilometres wide.
Here is the problem with every figure above, drawn to scale. This is a section straight across the island: out of the sea west of Kamariotissa, through the port at sea level, over the summit of Fengári, and down to the water on the far coast. Twenty-two kilometres of ground and 1.6 kilometres of vertical — and the model that produced our wind numbers sees all of it as one cell, with one wind speed.
Real elevation, 200 measured points about 110 metres apart. The vertical is stretched five-fold, and the turbines are symbols — an Atlas is two metres tall, which at this scale is a hairline.
The three marks are not addresses. They are just three heights off that profile: the harbour on the water, a sheltered slope at 254 metres, and an exposed ridge at 990. In reality those are three different wind climates. Air speeds up as it is forced over rising ground, and it slows in the lee of everything upwind of it; the gap between the sheltered and the exposed side of a mountain like this one is easily larger than the gap between the windiest and calmest months on our chart. The model has one number for all three marks. So does every other free dataset you will find.
What this page is not.
It is not a survey of anybody’s roof. The figures here come from a reanalysis model on a grid of tens of kilometres, at ten metres above ground, over open terrain. A model cannot see your garden, and the section above is the reason why.
And it is not a customer story. We do not publish where our turbines go, who bought them or what they paid — not on islands where the population is small enough that a new turbine on a roof identifies a household, and not anywhere else either. If you live here, or somewhere like here, the useful thing to send us is your own situation: which side of the island, how exposed, what you need to keep running. We will tell you which blade set applies, and we will tell you honestly if the answer is that the site does not suit a turbine at all.
Eighty-seven per cent of hours with usable wind is a good site.
Eleven months of data and one honest gap is a good answer.
Wind and solar figures are from the European Commission Joint Research Centre’s PVGIS v5.2 typical meteorological year for 40.45°N 25.53°E at 132 m elevation, radiation from PVGIS-SARAH2 and wind from ERA5, drawn from 2005 to 2020. PVGIS treats the coastline itself as sea at this island’s scale, so the reading is from an inland point. Wind percentages are the mean cube of the ten-metre wind speed, which is the energy available in the wind and not the output of any turbine; a typical year composes each month from a different real year. December wind is excluded for the reason given above. The terrain section is built from SRTM 30 m elevation data served by opentopodata.org: 200 samples about 110 metres apart on a straight line from 40.4779°N 25.4587°E to 40.4457°N 25.7173°E, fixed at one end by the ferry port and passing through the highest sample we could find on the island, which reads 1,601 m against a published summit of 1,611 m — a ten-metre difference is what a thirty-metre grid does to a sharp peak. The vertical scale on that graphic is exaggerated by a factor of 4.9, stated on the graphic itself, and the turbine marks on it are symbols rather than scale drawings. The position of Kamariotissa is a public geographic fact. No customer, order, address or installation is named, described or shown on this page.