Tuesday the 1st of October, the Danish Wind Energy sector gathered in Herning for the 5th annual WindEnergy Denmark event. Coming on the back of an ambitious new climate target from the Danish Government and a positive outlook for the global wind energy market, the event addressed some of the main challenges for wind energy research and innovation.
The event attracted more than 350 participants from industry, universities, public authorities, funding bodies etc. The department contributed with 13 presentations in the 21 different sessions.
Among the key topics were what to expect from the new government and parliament, Vestas and SGRE announcing layoffs and major new sector challenges including Power2X and talent recruitment.
We asked Head of Section and Programme Manager for Siting and Integration, Hans Ejsing Jørgensen, to single out some important takeaways.
“Diversity and inclusion. This is about using the full competence pool in the population, especially women. We need to increase the share of women in wind energy. Take DTU Wind Energy as an example. Women make up 22% of our staff. That is an increase from 5 years ago, but it is going way too slow. This is both a question of reaping the benefits of diversity in the work place, but also a simply issue of attracting enough talented people to work in the sector”.
System integration and its influence on turbine and wind farm design would be my second topic to highlight. The sessions on sustaining the value of wind and the importance of Power2X zoom in on the need for innovations to support the green transition. This is critical if we want to achieve the 70% CO2 reduction by 2030 as targeted by the Danish Government. For us at DTU Wind Energy, one of the interesting topics here is how changing system requirements and Power2X open up new ways to innovate in the design of wind turbines and wind farms. A good example of that is the LowWind project that we have launched together with Vestas. It is supported by EUDP and aims to develop radical new designs of turbines that can produce electricity at very low wind speeds.
And last, but not least, I will of course mention my own field on wind resource assessment. This is a classical field of wind energy R&D, but new technologies really allow us to push beyond current boundaries. Technologies such as lidars and the opportunities for advanced flow models using high performance computers open up the possibility of new innovations that we at DTU Wind Energy are very excited about.”
DTU Wind Energy contributed to several other sessions at the WindEnergy Denmark event, including the sessions on new materials, blades, game changers and Megavind. The complete programme can be found here.