UPscaling WIND turbines using digital twins technologies. Repowering design, validation and monitoring.

ongoing

Clean energy production needs to expand in order for Europe to achieve its net-zero emission goals of 2050. UPWIND aims at the “massive” and “rapid” upscaling of the current onshore wind turbine stock in order to address the highly challenging sustainable energy targets and mitigate climate crisis. 38GW of existing onshore wind structures will reach their end-of-life in Europe by 2025 and new wind farms typically take about 13 years from concept to operation. Upscaling existing structures is the only reliable strategy to immediately increase wind energy installations as it can double generation capacity (in MW) of existing onshore wind farms within a very short period. UPWIND aims to develop an innovative machine learning-assisted upscaling framework for existing onshore wind structures to be converted to new-age powerful ones. This will be achieved by replacing old turbines with more efficient and powerful new-age turbines, increasing the height of the existing onshore tubular steel wind turbine towers, enhancing the load-bearing capacity of the towers and by extending their operational life. The research output of UPWIND will enable decision-making for innovative repowering strategies focusing on upscaling the existing support towers to bear the new loads (increased self-weight, fatigue vibrations) caused by heightening and new turbines installation, by selecting suitable strengthening schemes. New upscaling methods and strengthening schemes will be implemented and a new digitalized decision-making framework for repowering old wind turbine towers will be developed. UPWIND will introduce a gamechanger strategy that will directly increase energy production from wind structures, taking advantage of the already used best onshore locations and existing permissions, avoiding non-economic and non-environmental friendly total tower replacements, thus significantly contributing to a fully circular net-zero future for the european energy sector.