Developing Airborne Wind Energy Safety and Technical Guidelines

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 Airborne Wind Energy Safety and Technical Guidelines

Airborne Wind Europe The aim of the łWG Safety and Technical Guidelinesž of

Airborne Wind Europe is to draft a guideline applying best practices and complying with official requirements for all safety related issues. The goal is to prevent any dam-ages through AWE systems, to enhance confidence in the compliance with safety and other requirements and to provide guidance to any competent authority and other stakeholders that deal with AWE projects, e.g. regarding granting permits, loan financing, etc. AWE systems will have to comply with two main frameworks:

• IEC Standards which cover electro-technical aspects. • EASA guidelines and standards which cover all

airspace and aviation related aspects.

As AWE technology is a novel application, the two frame-works will be applied in overlap, especially when it comes to safety issues. It was agreed to elaborate a techni-cal guideline structured according to IEC 61400 for wind energy systems and to link or reference crucial require-ments and suitable components from the EASA frame-work. It was agreed that in the beginning, the guideline should be rather on high level, defining clear principles that are acceptable to all companies. However, as the aim is to give also third parties and competent authori-ties a good understanding whether a company is applying the guidelines (or future standards), it should also include specific information in annexes or additional documents. The Technical AWE Guideline is meant to become an um-brella document defining all relevant AWE aspects to be presented towards administrations and other stakehold-ers and where all companies would find the parts relevant for them. The following approach has been taken:

• Working on the draft guideline to present at a starting

point to non-AWE stakeholders

• Inviting partners to the process, e.g. universities, sup-pliers, certification companies, authorities, project developers and planners etc.

• Elaboration of the guidelines with stakeholders: Based on the draft, the guideline will be further de-veloped in subgroups or committees where non-AWE companies will be involved.

The German FGW e.V. (Fördergesellschaft Windenergie) will support the elaboration process. After a prioritisation exercise, six Working Sub-Groups were set up which elab-orate the first drafts of the most relevant chapters:

• Tether ś durability • Tether ś safe operations • Ground station • Airborne structure

• Wind conditions and power performance • Operation risk assessment

Meanwhile, the first drafts have been shared and com-mented on. Most advanced is the elaboration of the guidelines for the operational risk assessments which is based on the Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) V2.0 Guidelines recently published by the Joint Authority on Rulemaking for Unmanned Systems (JARUS) on spe-cific operations. It also considers the recent experience of the AWEurope member in applying this process to seek an Operational Approval (OA) for an AWE operation in the specific category.

AWEurope plans to present the approach taken by the Working Group as well as initial findings at AWEC 2019 to seek feedback and further input from stakeholders and