• Energy Research
• 2016 close
• 2019 close

To achieve a thorough investigation for defect presence on a wind turbine blade, close inspection is required. This implies either trained staff tied with ropes on the blade or dismantling and transferring the blade in a workshop environment. While blade dismantling is scarcely used because it requires very long downtime, human inspection also involve a relatively high delay. A solution to this problem is to utilize specially designed platforms that can reach the blade and implement faster inspections on site. However, current systems are not very agile or cannot reach close enough to the blade in order to use a high quality nondestructive technique. Hence, they are mostly used to carry out mere visual inspections. To deal with the aforementioned challenge, our team will commercialize WInspector. WInspector consists of an agile robotic platform able to climb up the wind turbine tower and deploy an advanced Digital Shearography kit that carries out the inspection of a blade at a depth of up to 50mm. Users of WInspector benefit through early detecting emerging defects unseen in a visual inspection performed by competing solutions, with a significantly lower downtime for the WTB, and free of dangerous human labor. We have tested and validated the capabilities of WInspector in relevant environment and based on feedback received by wind farm operators, including project participant Gamesa and Iberdola (who has supported us in writing for this application), we are now ready to take the next steps and complete product development allowing us to bring WInspector into the market. Our vision is to grow our businesses by €19.88 million in gross sales by 2023 and keep growing at 58.8% annually from 2023 onwards. Through our business growth, we will create 181 new jobs. It is our strong belief that the Fast Track to Innovation Pilot is the ideal financial instrument for us to accelerate the procedures required for commercialization.

In ELICAN, a strong team of complementary European companies with worldwide leading presence in the Wind Energy industry join forces to provide the market with a disruptive high-capacity and cost-reducing integrated substructure system for deep offshore wind energy. The technology is exceptionally fitted to meet the technical and logistical challenges of the sector as it moves into deeper locations with larger turbines, while allowing for drastic cost reduction. This project will design, build, certify and fully demonstrate in operative environment a deep water substructure prototype supporting Adwen’s 5MW offshore wind turbine, the be installed in the Southeast coast of Las Palmas (Canary Islands). It will become the first bottom-fixed offshore wind turbine in all of Southern Europe and the first one worldwide to be installed with no need of heavy-lift vessels. The revolutionary substructure consists in an integrated self-installing precast concrete telescopic tower and foundation that will allow for crane-free offshore installation of the complete substructure and wind turbine, thus overcoming the constraints imposed by the dependence on heavy-lift vessels. It will allow for a full inshore preassembly of the complete system, which is key to generate a highly industrialized low-cost manufacturing process with fast production rates and optimized risk control. The main benefits to be provided by this ground-breaking technology are: • Significant cost reduction (>35%) compared with current solutions. • Direct scalability in terms of turbine size, water depth, infrastructure and installation means. • Complete independence of heavy-lift vessels • Excellently suited for fast industrialized construction. • Robust and durable concrete substructure for reduced OPEX costs and improved asset integrity. • Suitable for most soil conditions, including rocky seabeds. • Enhanced environmental friendliness regarding both impact on sea life and carbon footprint.

Low-cost atmospheric deposition of semiconductor absorbance layers for application in photovoltaic solar cells that do not require expensive instrumentation continue to attract interest of researchers and engineers alike. This project is based on our recent discovery of combinations of solvents capable of dissolving various inorganic salts, which were successfully applied in the fabrication of CIGS PV devices. However, the nature of solutes remains unclear. Therefore this project is dedicated to fill this gap and to carry out investigation of the solutions of metal chalcogenides relevant to the formation of semiconductor thin films. Apart from chalcogenides, pure metals and metal oxides will be also investigated. We aim to establish exact chemical composition of the dominating species of metal complexes in the solutions that will enable better understanding of the underlying chemical processes and will facilitate development of conditions for thermal decomposition of the complexes to form semiconductor films with given stoichiometry and composition. The main focus will be on, but not limited to, the complexes of Cu, Zn and Sn comprising the CZTS thin films. The results will be used in fabrication of efficient solution processed solar cells.

We have developed a resource-efficient and affordable bladeless Vortex wind generator. VORTEX Bladeless´ innovative wind turbine represent a true breakthrough in the wind energy market. The Vortex wind generator device represents a new paradigm of harnessing wind, with a new disruptive concept of a wind power generator without blades. VORTEX is able to capture the wind kinetic energy by 'vortex shedding', transforming it into electricity. The technology seeks to improve issues such as maintenance, amortization, noise, environmental impact, logistics and visual aspect, performing a secure, clean and efficient energy product, that is half cheaper than current small wind turbines (SWT). VORTEX make renewable energies, (replacement of PV, wind energy, combination of both) more financially accessible for our end-users: ESCOS, installation companies, businesses, home-owners, vessels, isolated housed, telecom station, etc. Clients will benefit from this new technology, especially in areas where solar energy does not perform well. Vortex has yielded excellent results and lots of industry and commercial interest. We have a 6-meter Vortex Bladeless wind turbine pilot in Spain, which generates up to 40% of energy solely from wind. The technology has been tested for scalability.. Our goal for Phase 2 is to scale-up and test a 2,75–meter version of the Vortex Wind Generator (providing 100W for future commercialization and massive market uptake. We want to achieve the goals of becoming the designer, manufacturer and seller of the first-ever bladeless wind generator for the Small Wind Market (SWM). Combing our patented and market-backed technology with improved properties, we want to reinvigorate the SWM - addressing EU 2020 energy targets - with our Vortex Bladeless wind generators, positioning us as leader of the sector. Our end-users will also see their pay-back returned within 5 years, thanks to its market-changing commercialization price

The EU Agency for Safety & Health is currently amending wind turbine standards (such as EN 50308) to ensure safer O&M tasks and increase the Probability Of Detection (POD) for wind turbine defects. ISO have also identified such issues, and in fact initiated the development of QA standards specifically tailored for the Condition Monitoring (CM) of wind turbines. Current CM systems are intrusive, and hence revoke the initial OEM warranty of drive-train components. The combination of industrial and legislative factors is the key driver behind the production of CMDrive: a bespoke and non-intrusive acoustic-analysis CM system, having a POD for drive-train defects of 90-98% within the range of operating powers. The requested grant of €2.5m will be required to validate and enhance the system, and initiate the commercialisation process. Growth in the wind services sector, as related to O&M and CM, is also compelling, as studies by Deloitte have shown that the corresponding market is estimated to increase from €5.2b to €10.8b by 2020, with a CAGR of 10%. The first generation of CMDrive shall be produced for wind turbines of 2.5MW or less; a next generation product, to handle larger turbines, has already been envisioned. The commercialisation strategy involves the segmentation of the wind turbine market into 3 initial customer tiers, is targeting WFOs and Independent Service Providers of CM within such tiers, and will position the product through a number of Unique Selling Points, which will be elaborated further in this proposal. The locations of the 5 partners, in addition to the global outreach of TWI and INESCO, are critical factors for launching the product by 2019. It is expected that CMDrive’s associated revenue streams (sales, services, licensing) will yield an estimated ROI of 1100%, and corresponding cumulative profits of €26m, over the 5 year forecast (2019–2023). INESCO will take lead of the sales, with the other partners benefiting by means of profit shares.

Screw (or helical) piles are foundations which are screwed into the ground. They are widely used onshore for supporting motorway signs and gantries as they possess good tensile and compressive resistance. This project aims to make screw piles a more attractive foundation (or anchoring) option offshore for wind farms, which are being deployed in deeper water and subject to increasing performance demands. The UK has challenging targets for expansion of energy from renewables with the potential for over 5000 offshore wind turbines by 2020. The necessary move to deeper water will increase cost and put greater demands on subsea structures and foundations. The current foundation solutions being considered for these applications are driven piles, large monopiles or concrete gravity based structures (GBS). Driving of piles in large numbers offshore causes concerns over plant availability and impact on marine mammals. There are also concerns over the limit of practical monopile development and the high material demands of GBS. Screw piles have the potential to overcome these issues and are scalable for future development from current onshore systems which have relatively low noise installation and are efficient in terms of both tensile and compressive capacity. To meet offshore demands, screw piles will require geometry enhancement but it is envisaged that these will initially be modest to allow de-risked transfer of onshore technology offshore. This will lead to the deployment of several smaller piles or pile groups rather than moving straight to very large single screw piles that may prove difficult to install and require significant investment. To allow screw piles to be considered as a foundation solution for offshore wind this project will develop piles with optimised geometries that minimise resistance to installation but are capable of carrying high lateral and moment loads. In order to install screw piles torque devices are used to effectively screw the anchors into the ground. With increased pile size requirements and potential changes in geometry this project will develop improved, less empirical techniques to predict the torque required in a variety of soil conditions. This will allow confidence in pile installation and investment in appropriately sized installation plant. As new pile geometries are being developed these will need to be tested (through model, numerical and field testing in this project) to verify that they can meet the performance demands of the offshore environment. The project will also develop bespoke analysis techniques to allow consulting geotechnical engineers the tools they require to design the foundations and contractors the tools to inform the installation processes. As piles can be deployed as large single units or smaller units in groups the efficiency of group deployment and multiple foundation geometries will be explored, as using several smaller geometry foundations could reduce the risks during offshore installation and actually be more economic due to lower fabrication costs and demands on installation plant. The areas of investigation above will be combined to produce a design and decision making toolkit for use by geotechnical designers to allow deployment of screw piles as offshore foundations in an efficient and cost effective manner. The research has the potential to make it easier to deploy screw pile foundations for offshore renewables. This project will develop foundations able to deal with current water depths and will provide understanding of the behaviour of piles as water depths and the demands on the foundations increase. By harnessing the installation and performance benefits of screw pile/anchor technology, the results of the project will contribute to an overall cost reduction in electricity generated by renewable means and increase the public's confidence in the future viability of this energy source.

Despite the encouraging scenario of Wide Solar Thermal Electricity market - it is a reality today with 4.9 GW in operation worldwide in 2015, forecasting 260 GW in 2030, 664GW in 2040 and finally to reach a 12% of total electricity generation by 2050 (982 GW) - CSP growth has been slower than expected because several issues have not been overcome yet. It is not as cost-efficient as other technologies making difficult its access to the generation mix. Another not-solved aspect is flexibility, since one of the main issues of the electrical market is the complexity to match the supply and demand curves due to the arbitrariness of the sun. Finally, CSP technology brings environmental issues related to the usage of oil sinthetic as HTF and a meaningful water consumption. In this framework, MSLOOP 2.0 aims to validate a business opportunity consisting of developing a cost effective solar field for CSP Parabolic Trough Power Plants using optimized ternary molten salts as HTF with an innovative hybridization system. The result of the project will be a new solution of CSP commercial plant with at least a 20 % LCOE reduction and flexibility improvement providing firm and dispatchable electricity based on a disruptive and environmentally friendly innovation. MSLOOP 2.0 will ensure the market-drivers acceptance from the beginning of the project in order to launch the solution in open tenders in less of 6 months after the project final, boosting significant contributions to industry, environment and society and that will make possible a deep penetration of CSP plants in the generation mix increasing the share of renewables. In order to achieve this challenge, the MSLOOP 2.0 consortium consists of a multidisciplinary team formed by 5 partners from 3 European Union member countries in strategic fields within solar thermal sector. This composition will boost an innovative development capable of achieving a strong positioning in the market.

SET-Nav will support strategic decision making in Europe’s energy sector, enhancing innovation towards a clean, secure and efficient energy system. Our research will enable the EC, national governments and regulators to facilitate the development of optimal technology portfolios by market actors. We will comprehensively address critical uncertainties and derive appropriate policy and market responses. Our findings will support the further development of the SET-Plan and its implementation by continuous stakeholder involvement. These contributions of the SET-Nav project rest on three pillars: The wide range of objectives and analytical challenges set out by the call for proposals can only be met by developing a broad and technically-advanced modelling portfolio. Advancing this portfolio and enabling knowledge exchange via a modelling forum is our first pillar. The EU’s energy, innovation and climate challenges define the direction of a future EU energy system, but the specific technology pathways are policy sensitive and need careful comparative evaluation. This is our second pillar. Using our strengthened modelling capabilities in an integrated modelling hierarchy, we will analyse multiple dimensions of impact of future pathways: sustainability, reliability and supply security, global competitiveness and efficiency. This analysis will combine bottom-up ‘case studies’ linked to the full range of SET-Plan themes with holistic ‘transformation pathways’. Stakeholder dialogue and dissemination is the third pillar of SET-Nav. We have prepared for a lively stakeholder dialogue through a series of events on critical SET-Plan themes. The active involvement of stakeholders in a two-way feedback process will provide a reality check on our modelling assumptions and approaches, and ensure high policy relevance. Our aim is to ensure policy and market actors alike can navigate effectively through the diverse options available on energy innovation and system transformation.

One problem when we are trying to field super-big wind turbines is that all components involved become super heavy as well, particularly power generators. Heavier power generators require more robust foundation towers for support, which dramatically increase the cost of the entire system. The project is to investigate approaches of lightening up the next generation of utility scale turbines to generate 10 MW peak power. The major aim of this project is to develop a new compact superconductor-based generator able to work in both onshore and offshore wind turbines. Based on previous research work, it was proven that the weight when compared to conventional power generators could be reduced by at least 30% by applying superconductors. However, further work is required to analyse and improve the existing design; such as in regards to the superconducting windings and the cryogenic cooling system. The final objective is to build a 15kW prototype to prove the feasibility of the new lightweight power generator.