Denmark: Ramboll Member of EU Funded InnWind.EU Project

Ramboll is part of the winning consortium for a new R&D initiative from the European Commission in the field of wind energy named innWind.EU.

With a total project budget of €20M and a duration of 5 years it is one of the largest projects in that area in the decade. The consortium comprises 27 leading industrial partners and research establishments, among them SIEMENS, DTU, DHI, GL-GARRAD HASSAN, GAMESA, SINTEF and FRAUNHOFER. The project addresses the heart of the long-term R&D programme for new turbines and components of the European Wind Initiative (EWI) established under SET-Plan, the Common European Policy for Energy Technologies.

Ambitious objectives

The objectives of the innWind.EU project are high performance innovative design of beyond-state-of-the-art 10-20MW offshore wind turbines and hardware demonstrators of its critical components. These ambitious primary objectives lead to a set of secondary objectives, which are the specific innovations, new concepts, new technologies and proof of concepts. The progress beyond the state-of-the-art is envisaged as an integrated wind turbine concept with

1. a light weight rotor with adaptive characteristics from built-in geometrical and structural couplings and active distributed intelligent control,
2. an innovative, low-weight, direct drive generator and
3. an integrated tower and substructure design that simplifies and unifies turbine structural dynamic characteristics at different water depths and enables mass-production and optimized installation methods.

The benefits of each innovation will be quantified through suitable performance indicators, and their market deployment opportunities are concretely established in integrating working groups.

Within the project, the Technical University of Denmark will head the overall project and Ramboll will head one of the four major work packages, namely work package 4 on offshore foundations and support structures. This gives Ramboll a key role in the organisation, but also key responsibility for the success of the overall project. The project will be headed by Ramboll’s wind team in Hamburg.

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Press release, October 15, 2012; Image: ramboll