WAUDIT represents the main players in European research in wind resource assessment and constitutes an optimum framework for the education of young researchers. The project will focus on organising and coordinating 18 PhD theses on wind energy assessment in unison with the activities of the European Academy of Wind Energy. The project consortium coordinated by Cener comprises 13 European institutions and 16 associate research centres. The presence of industrial partners such as France’s EDF, the German energy giant E.On and Spain’s Enhol Group, assures an applied research approach with optimal opportunities for the training of fellows (secondments, access to test cases, etc).
Wind turbine manufacturers such as Gamesa, Bard and Vestas and the engineering companies Garrad Hassan and Windrad Engineering among others are also critical to the success of WAUDIT, while the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, the Universidad Politécnica in Madrid, the Technical University of Denmark (Riso-DTU), the University of Oldenburg, the Paris School of Engineering (ENPC), the University of Hamburg, the University of Loughborough (CREST) and R&D centres such as the Greek Centre for Renewable Energies (CRES) and Cener also play a part.
Growth means more R&D
There is an urgent demand for highly specialised scientists for the wind energy industry. According to a survey commissioned by the Husum Wind Energy Trade Fair (September 2008) among the main companies active in the international wind energy market, an overwhelming increase of more than 700% in installed capacity could be reached by 2017 with respect to the accumulated wind power at the end of 2007 (718GW in 2017 with respect to 94GW at the end of 2007). The activity constitutes an annual increase rate of 20%, which makes wind energy one of the fastest growing technologies worldwide. Considering the leading role of the European wind energy industry, it is completely justified to increase the pool of European researchers in order to face this fast market expansion with the corresponding technology improvement.
Among the wide range of multidisciplinary topics on wind energy technology, the European Wind Energy Technology Platform (TPWind) identifies Wind Conditions as one of the key thematic areas for the development of the future research activities of the sector. The 3% vision aims at reducing uncertainties in wind resource assessment and forecasting below 3% by 2030, regardless of the site conditions (offshore, flat or complex terrain). This objective will make wind energy a major modern, reliable and cost competitive source of energy.
The title of WAUDIT includes two important words that define very appropriately the overall objective of the coordinated research within the project: audit and standardization. The possibility of working in close contact with the wind energy industry will provide a good perspective of current state-of-the-art on wind resource assessment at industrial level. A technical audit of current standard methodologies will determine the point of departure of each research project. Then, the aim of each research project will be to propose new techniques, of added value to the industry, in order to reach a new level of standardization of methodologies, closer to the state-of-the-art that can be found at academic level.
The step ahead, which is foreseen at industrial level, implies the migration from traditional measurement and numerical modelling techniques, applied at engineering level, to more advanced tools requiring higher levels of professional training in multidisciplinary fields such as instrumentation, Meteorology, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and data processing.
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