Last week, nine key research organisations and universities, all members of EERA JP Wind, 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. 

Brussels, 18 September 2023 – 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.

"It is the first time that multiple research organisations, from six different European countries, agree to take this kind of initiative. We are looking forward to what is needed, not just in the next two or three years, but also in the next two or three decades," said Ignacio Martí, Coordinator of the European Energy Research Alliance Joint Programme Wind (EERA JP Wind), at the occasion of the signature during the JP Wind Innovation Forum in Amsterdam.

The signing organisations are SINTEF, DTU, ForWind, TNO, Fraunhofer, ORE Catapult, CENER, CIEMAT and NTNU.

"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. The ad hoc project-by-project is not enough anymore. We need to create a permanent platform for stronger collaboration between research and industry and governments across Europe," Tande concluded.

The European Centre of Excellence will be managed by EERA JP Wind and is intended to integrate the members of the Joint Programme and potentially new ones in the future as its work progresses.

Get more details with the event video.

About EERA JP Wind
The Joint Programme on Wind Energy is one of 18 JPs of the European Energy Research Alliance (EERA), which is an association of European public research centres and universities active in low-carbon energy research. EERA pursues the mission of catalysing European energy research for a climate-neutral society by 2050. EERA JP Wind gathers 44 research centres and universities. The mission for EERA JP Wind is to provide strategic leadership for medium to long-term research and to support the European wind energy industry and societal stakeholders. The joint programme brings together the major public research organizations in Europe with substantial research and innovation efforts in wind energy and is organized in different sub-programmes, each of them corresponding to a major wind energy challenge. EERA JP Wind organizes each year the Wind Innovation Forum in Amsterdam, in collaboration with research and industry.

About the signatories
SINTEF Group, the largest independent research organization in Norway, create value and innovation through knowledge generation and development of technological solutions.

DTU (Technical University of Denmark), Department of Wind and Energy Systems, is a global leader in interdisciplinary research, development, and innovation in onshore and offshore wind energy across the entire value chain, from fundamental basic research to full-scale technology commercialization.

ForWind bundles wind energy research and connects 30 institutes and working groups from the universities of Oldenburg, Hanover and Bremen. Research focuses on engineering, physics and meteorology, computer science and economics.

Fraunhofer IWES secures investments in technological developments through validation, shortens innovation cycles, accelerates certification procedures, and increases planning accuracy by means of innovative measurement methods in the wind energy and hydrogen technology sectors.

TNO, The Netherlands’s Organization of Applied Scientific Research, is an independent not-for-profit research organization in the Netherlands. Its expertise and research make an important contribution to the competitiveness of companies and organizations as well as the economy and the quality of society as a whole.

CIEMAT is a public research body assigned to the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation focusing on energy and environment and the technologies related to them. It collaborates with other R&D&I institutions, universities, and businesses in the sector to transfer the knowledge and technology that it has generated, supporting, and encouraging innovation and changing the economic mode.

Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult is the UK’s leading innovation centre for offshore renewable energy, established in 2013 by the UK Government as part of a network of Catapults set up by Innovate UK in high growth industries. ORE Catapult operates in Glasgow, Blyth, Levenmouth, Aberdeen, the Humber, the East of England, the Southwest, and Wales, and operates a collaborative research partnership in China.

The National Renewable Energy Centre of Spain (CENER) develops applied research in renewable energies and provides technological support to companies and energy institutions in five areas: wind, solar thermal and photovoltaic solar energy, biomass, energy transition in cities, and grid integration, electrical storage and hydrogen.

NTNU is the largest university in Norway and conducts cutting-edge research within ocean and marine technology. It stands out as the most important Norwegian institution in the field of social science research on environmentally friendly energy.