Vision of a kite wind park for MW-scale energy generation
Kristian Petrick
Policy and Regulation Airborne Wind Europe Airborne Wind Europe Avenue de la Renaissance 1
1000 Brussels Belgium
kristian.petrick@airbornewindeurope.org www.airbornewindeurope.org
Developing a European Roadmap for Airborne Wind Energy
Kristian Petrick, Udo Zillmann
Airborne Wind Europe
At the Wind Hamburg conference 2019, the members of Airborne Wind Europe agreed to start five Working Groups (WGs) where sector-wide issues would be tackled in a collaborative way. One of the WGs, the łWG Roadmapž was tasked to develop a roadmap for the AWE indus-try with the objective to describe sector’s potential de-velopment and deployment pathways up to 2030. The approach consisted in a bottom-up, Excel-based survey where members were asked to provide their business plans and/or best estimates in terms of pre-commercial and commercial projects:
For each pre-commercial system (pilots, demonstrators, test systems)
• Nominal power of the system • Investment needs
• Costs per kite and year • Number of kites built • Cost per ground-station
• Number of ground-stations required • Total system costs
• Expected number of employees (direct FTEs) For each pre-commercial system (pilots, demonstrators, test systems)
• Nominal power of the system • Price per system and year • Number of systems sold • Total sales [e]
• Total capacity installed [MW]
• Expected number of employees (direct FTEs) Ten companies participated in the exercise, even though
some were not providing all data. The provided figures were aggregated and presented as graphs. Data were anonymised to safeguard confidentiality. Preliminary re-sults show:
• One company dominates the sector growth in the łbase scenariož
• Cumulated investment needs until 2025 for pre-commercial systems amount to some 250 Mio Euro for nine companies alone
• Most companies plan less than five demonstrators per year, while one company plans more than 20 within two years.
• Six companies start with commercial systems of 100 kW, the others plan between 250 kW and 2000 kW • First commercial system is planned to be available for
in 2020
• Nine out of ten companies plan market launch of com-mercial systems by 2023.
In addition, potential scenarios for the year 2050 were elaborated based on published scenarios for the wind sector. The WG plans to publish the findings at the AWEC 2019. Unlike other studies on the AWE sector, this exer-cise intends to provide numbers that come directly from the companies themselves. However, the discussion re-vealed the high level of uncertainty regarding assump-tions and future developments. It is therefore planned to repeat the exercise on an annual or bi-annual basis in order to adapt the figures to latest developments includ-ing technological achievements and the policy and regu-latory environment.
