IEA Wind Task 37, Systems Engineering/ Integrated RD&D

With the increased worldwide focus on renewable energy, the wind energy sector has evolved into a large international industry. The growth in both size and complexity of wind turbines and plants has led to the wind power plant having to be viewed as an integrated system that requires a more holistic, full life-cycle – System Engineering (SE) – approach to its design in order to continue to drive down the cost of energy (CoE). As an outcome of the increased international and Danish focus on systems engineering within the wind energy community, the IEA Wind Executive Committee recently approved a new annex: Annex 37 – Wind Energy Systems Enegineering: Integrated RD&D, which has the purpose of establishing an international platform for maturing the usage of systems engineering in wind energy. NREL, DTU Wind Energy and SINTEF are operating agents of this task.

The purpose of the present project is to support the Danish participation in Annex 37, and to coordinate this international effort with the national activities that relate to it. Additionally, the project will ensure that the results of the collaboration are coordinated with and disseminated to the Danish industry through a series of workshops.

Annex 37 consists of three main work packages: WP1: Guidelines on a common framework for wind energy systems; WP2: Reference wind energy systems; and WP3: Benchmarking multidisciplinary analysis and optimization (MDAO) activities at different system levels (Turbines and plants). DTU Wind Energy intends to participate in all three work packages.