Kitepower presented significant advancements and shared valuable knowledge with consortium partners. The meeting highlighted the creation of a comprehensive knowledge and data hub on wind energy, spearheaded by MERIDIONAL and its sister projects, AIRE and FLOW. This open-access repository aims to make critical data accessible, fostering industry-wide innovation and collaboration.

Progress and innovation

“Meeting in person allows us to brainstorm, collaborate, and share knowledge effectively—key elements for progress and innovation” stated Roland Schmehl. Eduard Ijsselmuiden added: “The event underscored the consortium’s commitment to advancing wind energy technology as it nears the halfway point of its project duration.”

Looking ahead, Kitepower and its partners will continue their research and development efforts. One recent initiative by Oriol Cayon, a PhD candidate under Schmehl’s supervision, involved developing a sensor fusion approach in close collaboration with Kitepower. This approach, currently being tested, has the potential to significantly improve the system’s performance and robustness.

As a leader in airborne wind energy, Kitepower remains dedicated to advancing sustainable solutions and contributing to the global energy transition. The next consortium meeting is scheduled for November 2024 in Milan, Italy, hosted by the Politecnico di Milano.

The post Kitepower at 4th MERIDIONAL consortium meeting in Copenhagen appeared first on Kitepower.

The goal of the project is to achieve a better understanding of the unsteady inflow conditions at altitudes above the first layer of air above the ground (the surface layer). The aim is to develop a toolchain to efficiently and effectively assess the performance and reliability of airborne wind energy devices and conventional wind turbines. This is important to site evaluation but also for increasing the wind plant efficiency and making the operation of AWES safer.

MERIDIONAL’s consortium consists of a total of 12 partners including 5 leading technical universities (TUDelft as the coordinator and 4 others from Denmark, Italy and Germany) and 3 Airborne Wind Energy companies (Kitepower, Kitenergy, Kitekraft). One of the project partners is the US national renewable energy laboratory (NREL) which will contribute in-kind. The grant’s total budget is 6.7 million EUR, most of which is reserved for the universities while Kitepower will receive around 240.000 EUR. The project is 100% funded over a total runtime of 4 years.

In addition to the standard instruments of a Kitepower system (using the kite as a sensor), ground-based LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and drone-mounted 3D flow measurements performed during the flight tests, Kitepower will contribute to the models of the toolchain with system knowledge and test data. A further area of interest will be the interaction of the flow and the movements and shape of the kite. Based on the new toolchain, predictions of system performance in upscaled or park configurations will also be made. The latter analysis is particularly important to predict the impact of airborne wind energy on the future energy landscape.

The proposal convincingly demonstrates significant progress beyond the state of the art, regarding forecasting wind flow in high altitudes for airborne wind energy systems (AWES).

EU Horizon commission

We are very happy that the European Commission recognizes the importance of developing the toolchain and associated models and supports the airborne wind energy community in achieving its goal to make an impact. 

The post MERIDIONAL proposal awarded by the EU appeared first on Kitepower.