EU Horizon 2020 Projects AWESCO and REACH - Advancing Airborne Wind Energy Technologies by Systematic Research and Development

The Kitepower 2.0 project team at Valkenburg airfield (8 November 2014)

AWESCO members: (above) at the midterm project meeting (8 February, 2017), and (below) during a course (3ś4 March, 2016)

Roland Schmehl Associate Professor Delft University of Technology Faculty of Aerospace Engineering

Wind Energy Research Group

Kluyverweg 1 2629 HS Delft The Netherlands

r.schmehl@tudelft.nl kitepower.tudelft.nl

EU Horizon 2020 Projects AWESCO and REACH ś Advancing Airborne Wind Energy

Technologies by Systematic Research and Development

Roland Schmehl

Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology

Airborne wind energy is the central theme of several projects funded by the European Union within its frame-work programme Horizon 2020. In this presentation I will highlight two specific projects in which I am involved as coordinator, AWESCO and REACH, and will show how the two parallel actions not only complement each other but create a synergy effect, interleaving also with other paral-lel actions.

AWESCO (“Airborne Wind Energy System Modelling, Con-trol and Optimisationž) is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie doc-toral training network, co-financed by the Swiss Federal Government and comprising 14 PhD fellows active at 8 universities and 3 industry partners [1]. The aim of this network, which runs from 2015 to 2018, is to collabora-tively address the key challenges of airborne wind en-ergy to support the commercialisation of the technol-ogy. The group photo at the top of the page176shows the AWESCO PhD researchers together with their super-visors and management staff at the midterm meeting of the project at KU Leuven, on 8 February 2017. The photos below illustrate a training course at the Univer-sity of Freiburg, on 3ś4 March 2016, during which the re-searchers had to collaboratively invent and design con-cepts for high-performance depower of a softkite for pumping cycle operation. This course on Project Manage-ment and Strategic Skills was managed by my colleagues Ni Yan and Ricardo Pereira.

REACH (“Resource Efficient Automatic Conversion of High-Altitude Windž) is a Fast Track to Innovation Pilot [2]. The project runs from 2015 to 2018 and aims at com-mercially developing a 100 kW pumping kite power

sys-tem originally designed and tested at Delft University of Technology. At the centre of the project is the startup company Enevate BV using the trademark KitepowerTM_to market the developed system. Although the two projects AWESCO and REACH have different goals they are tightly linked through the participation of the university and the startup on both projects.

Parallel actions in H2020 are the projects AMPYXAP3 [3], EK200-AWESOME [4] and NextWind [5], all in the SME In-strument scheme, however, in different phases. The two supported SME’s, Ampyx Power and Enerkite, are also consortium partners in the AWESCO network and in this way linked to the research activities. A very recent Eu-rostars project is TwingPower [6]. This setup shows how the EU effectively uses different financing instruments to increase the readiness level of the technology and sup-ports the commercialisation.

References:

[1] AWESCO (H2020-ITN-642682), e 2,999,014

http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/193938_en.html

[2] REACH (H2020-FTIPilot-691173), e3,665,744

http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/199241_en.html [3] AMPYXAP3 (H2020-SMEINST-2-666793), e 3,701,937 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/199241_en.html [4] EK200-AWESOME (H2020-SMEINST-1-736399), e 71,429 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/205145_en.html [5] NextWind (H2020-SMEINST-1-774974), e 71,429 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/210686_en.html [6] TwingPower (Eurostars-11105) e 1,504,180 https://www.eurostars-eureka.eu/project/id/11105

Rigid wing kite of 3 m span with Vertical Take-Off and Landing system. TU Delft Aerospace Engineering "Design Synthesis Exercise" (6 July 2017)