Last week, nine key research organisations and universities, including DTU Wind and Energy Systems, signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a European Centre of Excellence on wind energy.
“We need to speed up, and there’s a consensus that collaboration is needed to achieve the very ambitious goals of wind energy of the future. The European Centre of Excellence will be the platform where private and public funding will come together. It will define the research needs from both academia and industry and formulate the projects that will deliver the solutions necessary for wind energy in the future,” says, Ignacio Martí, EERA JP Wind Coordinator and Head of Division, signing on behalf of DTU Wind and Energy Systems.
It is the first time nine research organisations, from six different European countries, have agreed to take this kind of initiative. The signing organisations are SINTEF, DTU Wind, ForWind, TNO, Fraunhofer, ORE Catapult, CIEMAT and NTNU, from six different European countries, all EERA JP Wind members.
“We are looking forward to what is needed, not just in the next two or three years, but also in the next two or three decades,” Ignacio continues, “The Centre of Excellence will be a platform to discuss not only within the academic community in Europe but also with industry and public stakeholders. The idea is to speed up the impact of research to ensure that there is a good outcome of our research projects and that it is translated quickly into solutions for industry or into new inputs for the decision makers when they are planning wind energy deployment.”
The ambition of the European Centre of Excellence is to strengthen Europe’s long-term leadership in wind energy research through effective coordination, collaboration, and funding leverage.
“We will start focusing on some of the initiatives that have been developed in the EERA Joint Programme, e.g. the lighthouse initiatives on large-scale grid integration and floating wind. But we have identified several other areas around sustainability, flexibility, social and environmental interaction, etc..”
Watch video interview with Ignacio
here
About EERA JP Wind
The Joint Programme on Wind Energy is one of 18 JPs of the European Energy Research Alliance (EERA), which is an association of European public research centres and universities active in low-carbon energy research. EERA pursues the mission of catalysing European energy research for a climate-neutral society by 2050. EERA JP Wind gathers 44 research centres and universities. The mission for EERA JP Wind is to provide strategic leadership for medium to long-term research and to support the European wind energy industry and societal stakeholders. The joint programme brings together the major public research organizations in Europe with substantial research and innovation efforts in wind energy and is organized in different sub-programmes, each of them corresponding to a major wind energy challenge. EERA JP Wind organizes each year the Wind Innovation Forum in Amsterdam, in collaboration with research and industry.
About the signatories
DTU Wind and Energy Systems is a global leader in interdisciplinary research, development, and innovation in onshore and offshore wind energy across the entire value chain, from fundamental basic research to full-scale technology commercialization.
SINTEF Group, the largest independent research organization in Norway, create value and innovation through knowledge generation and development of technological solutions.
ForWind bundles wind energy research and connects 30 institutes and working groups from the universities of Oldenburg, Hanover and Bremen. Research focuses on engineering, physics and meteorology, computer science and economics.
Fraunhofer IWES secures investments in technological developments through validation, shortens innovation cycles, accelerates certification procedures, and increases planning accuracy by means of innovative measurement methods in the wind energy and hydrogen technology sectors.
TNO, The Netherlands’s Organization of Applied Scientific Research, is an independent not-for-profit research organization in the Netherlands. Its expertise and research make an important contribution to the competitiveness of companies and organizations as well as the economy and the quality of society as a whole.
CIEMAT is a public research body assigned to the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation focusing on energy and environment and the technologies related to them. It collaborates with other R&D&I institutions, universities, and businesses in the sector to transfer the knowledge and technology that it has generated, supporting and encouraging innovation and changing the economic mode.
ORE Catapult is the UK’s leading innovation centre for offshore renewable energy, established in 2013 by the UK Government as part of a network of Catapults set up by Innovate UK in high growth industries. ORE Catapult operates in Glasgow, Blyth, Levenmouth, Aberdeen, the Humber, the East of England, the Southwest and Wales, and operates a collaborative research partnership in China.
The National Renewable Energy Centre of Spain (CENER) develops applied research in renewable energies and provides technological support to companies and energy institutions in five areas: wind, solar thermal and photovoltaic solar energy, biomass, energy transition in cities, and grid integration, electrical storage and hydrogen.
NTNU is the largest university in Norway and conducts cutting-edge research within ocean and marine technology. It stands out as the most important Norwegian institution in the field of social science research on environmentally friendly energy.
