Last week, nine key research organisations and universities, all members of EERA JP Wind (European Energy Research Alliance Joint Programme Wind), signed a cooperative agreement to establish a European Centre of Excellence (EuCoE) on wind energy to boost European leadership in onshore and offshore wind energy research. The signing organisations are SINTEF, DTU, ForWind, TNO, Fraunhofer IWES, Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult, CIEMAT, CENER and NTNU.

“Signing this memorandum of understanding is showing commitment from the research community,” underlined Stephan Barth, EERA JP Wind Steering Committee member and co-signatory on the side of ForWind. “The needs of the industry and the need to ramp up both onshore and offshore wind energy deployment in Europe is enormously large.“

The ambition of the European Centre of Excellence is to strengthen Europe’s long-term leadership in wind energy research through effective coordination, collaboration, and funding leverage. Activities are expected to include collaborative research projects within a co-funded research programme.

The European Centre of Excellence will be managed by EERA JP Wind and is intended to integrate the other members of the Joint Programme and potentially new ones in the future as its work progresses. The Joint Programme on Wind Energy is one of 18 JPs of the European Energy Research Alliance (EERA), which is an association of European public research centres and universities active in low-carbon energy research. EERA pursues the mission of catalysing European energy research for a climate-neutral society by 2050. EERA JP Wind gathers 44 research centres and universities. The mission for EERA JP Wind is to provide strategic leadership for medium to long-term research and to support the European wind energy industry and societal stakeholders.

More on: www.eera-wind.eu