ECM6 - Marine and wind energies

Session Speakers

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Session 18: MARINE & WIND ENERGIES

Marine Energy, which includes wave, tidal and offshore wind offers a significant opportunity for maritime nations to develop new and sustainable energy resources. The 1970s saw significant early international progress in, for example, the UK, Norway, Portugal and Japan. This early research established the formal rigour required to underpin a new industry. Despite early research being curtailed by limited funding, the United Kingdom has taken radical steps to encourage the development of a new energy industry through innovative funding mechanism to encourage pre-commercial development. Research has been encouraged in UK Universities through radical programmes of funding such as the Supergen (Marine) project established by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Council (EPSRC) and the parallel Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) Marine Energy Programme, which has funded radical new studies into the ecological implications of development. Scotland has seen the creation of the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney, which allows the testing of full scale wave and tidal current energy technology in representative conditions. Devices installed at EMEC can export energy into the local grid while being closely monitored for their hydrodynamic and electrical performance.

Over the last 20 years wind energy has rapidly expanded from an emerging energy source, into a mature and well established global industry. Based on a unique collaboration between the research environment and industry, improvements in performance and reliability leading to falling generation costs have helped to make wind energy one of the most well established sources of renewable power. Wind power has seen a 15 year average growth in total installed capacity of over 25% per year worldwide, resulting in a total installed capacity of 285 GW by the end of 2012 that covers 2.6 % of global electricity consumption. This achievement has only been possible due to a combined effort on the continuous development, up-scaling and maturing of the technology that is facilitated by the parallel development of research based design tools, standards and procedures. Great opportunities, but also challenges still remain for the industry. Wind power needs to compete with conventional generation sources on a cost basis and therefore must be established and operated as efficiently as possible for a given resource. Temporal and geographical variability in the wind resource coupled with demand variability require effective wind characteristic predictions, as well as systems for successfully integrating wind power into the grid system. Environmental impacts such as noise should be minimised.

Computational modelling and development of wind turbine blade materials (20 minutes) Abstract

Leon Mishnaevsky Jr.
Dr. habil., Senior Scientist,
Technical University of Denmark
Denmark