BES: Wind of Innovation
January 22, 2021
There is an ever-increasing demand for low or zero carbon electricity generation, spurred by such coupled megatrends as population increase, climate change, and the electrification of heating, cooling and transportation. Wind energy is playing a crucial role in the Energy Transition, and it is expected to provide between one quarter to one third of the global electricity demand by 2050. Notwithstanding the great progress of wind energy in the last decades, and the widespread perception that wind is an already mature technology, its future development cannot be seen as 鈥渂usiness as usual鈥. In fact, there are still many scientific and technological challenges that need to be overcome to improve the turbine, the wind plant, the integration of wind in the future energy mix, and the lifecycle, circularity, impacts and acceptance of wind energy. In this talk we will present our view on some of the main scientific questions facing the field. We will take the opportunity offered by a few of these questions to present some of the work developed by the Wind Energy Institute at TUM, spanning from lifecycle design, to digital technologies for smart operation of turbines and farms, to validation and testing.