Last week, nine key research organisations and universities, inlcuding Dutch research centre TNO, signed a cooperative agreement to establish a European Centre of Excellence (EuCoE) on wind energy to boost European leadership in onshore and offshore wind energy research.
The signing organisations, all members of EERA JP Wind, are SINTEF, DTU, ForWind, TNO, Fraunhofer, ORE Catapult, CENER, CIEMAT and NTNU.
European research in wind energy gains momentum
There is a unanimous consensus that collaboration is the key to achieving the ambitious goals that lie ahead for the wind energy of the future. The EuCoE will be the platform where private and public funding will come together, defining the research needs from both academia and industry and formulating the projects that will deliver the necessary solutions.
Henk Jan Vink, Managing Director, TNO Energy and Materials Transition: “By working together even more at the European level as research organisations and industry, we are able to tackle the challenges facing the wind sector in Europe even better. It is a boost for TNO wind energy research and the Dutch offshore wind sector.”
Nine European research organisations
“Signing this memorandum of understanding is showing commitment from the research community,” underlined Stephan Barth, EERA JP Wind Steering Committee member and co-signatory on the side of ForWind. “The needs of the industry and the need to ramp up both onshore and offshore wind energy deployment in Europe is enormously large.”
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. Activities are expected to include collaborative research projects within a co-funded research programme.
“We could move on the usual way, we have been quite successful in developing research in Europe,” recognised John Olav Tande, EERA JP Wind Subprogramme Manager and co-signatory on the side of SINTEF. “Europe is very much on lead on offshore wind, but now the bar has been raised, and we have even higher ambitions.” Source: TNO
