WindCoE: Nordic Wind Energy Center

The process of planning, developing and operating cost-effective wind power in cold climate is challenging and raises the need for collaboration between regional institutes/industries. This is necessary to be able to cover the various fields ranging from technical and environmental to economic and social. With improved and coordinated activities, the ability to learn from each other by sharing existing and developing new knowledge, a Center of expertise for wind energy needs to be created. This project focused on development of center of expertise about wind energy in cold climate, by involving partners from northern parts of three Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden & Finland). The purpose of the CoE was to combine the power of Botnia-Atlantica region research units within Finland, Norway and Sweden to allow an intelligent implementation of wind energy to increase society’s acceptance of the technology. The target was to create better tools that can be useful for the sustainable development of wind power. The research collaboration combined the strongest groups within energy and simulation technologies in the Botnia-Atlantica region together to improve methods for assessing future energy production and delivery with renewable energy sources. With this center of expertise, it was possible to address cold climate wind energy issues from an interdisciplinary standpoint and working these issues will facilitate the sustainable development of wind power in the Nordic countries. To enable sustainable development of the wind energy sector and to help implement the wind energy projects at the local levels, the Wind Energy CoE aimed to deliver tools and information to the public and business sectors to accomplish:

• Improved knowledge and accuracy within wind resource assessment process in Nordic regions.
• Design and implementation of information management mechanisms capable of evolving to meet the changing nature of wind energy industry in Scandinavia.
• Development of methods to estimate and analyses the effects of cold climate (low temperature and ice accretion) on wind turbine’s performance and power production.
• Improved knowledge and development of better methods to simulate, analyze and measure wind turbine noise and its propagation.
• Development of advance virtual techniques allowing aural and visual landscape changes for proposed wind turbine projects for better public understanding.
• Use of validated mesoscale weather prediction methods for specific wind parks environments.

The main partners of this project were, University of Tromsø, Umeå University- Sweden, Luleå University of Technology-Sweden, NOVIA-Finland & University of Vaasa-Finland & Tampere University of Technology-Finland.

Project Duration:        2015- 2018

Project Funded By:     EU- Interreg Botnia Atlantica & Nordland Fylkeskommune.

Budget:                         1,45 mEUR