ROMEO and ZABALA at the Wind Europe Offshore Conference in Copenhagen

The  European project ROMEO, backed by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission, held a leading role at Wind Europe Offshore Conference 2019, that took place between the 26th and 28th of November at the Bella Center exhibition premises in Copenhagen.

During the event, where industry leaders and specialists discussed the main trends in offshore wind, exchanged scientific points of view, analysed technological achievements and reviewed economic perspectives, the flagship initiative had its own exhibition space at the stand E-F20.

In addition to that, the project will organize a scientific workshop “Digitalization concepts to optimize O&M strategies in Offshore Wind Energy” on the opening session of the event, the 26th of November, at 12 pm Danish local time in the Innovation Park.

The workshop will start with César Yanes, ROMEO Project coordinator in behalf of Iberdrola, who will be in charge of the introduction remarks.

The experts Cristian Rodenas-Soler, from Siemens Gamesa, and Elena González, representing Iberdrola – Scottish Power, both companies partners of Romeo Project, will make a presentation followed by a discussion panel to address novel approaches for the diagnosis and prognosis of critical failures affecting offshore wind turbines.

Úrsula Smolka, from Ramboll, will be in charge of sharing the requirements, challenges and opportunities delivered by the development of digital twins for structural parts in offshore wind turbines. During this session, the multi-scale pilot settled in the Wikinger offshore windfarm, located in the German waters of the Baltic Sea, will be presented.

Later, Daniel Rodríguez, from Minsait INDRA, Moritz Gräfe, from Uptime, and Michael Nidd, from IBM Research Zurich, will talk about disruptive digitalization concepts and cloud-based ecosystems. The case studies chosen to illustrate this conference are Wikinger and Teeside pilot tests.

The workshop will end with a fourth session about the development of an open access O&M tool for availability and cost estimation of offshore wind farms by the expert of the University of Strathclyde Athanasios Kolios.

Besides this workshop, ROMEO project will have a leading role at the conference programme. Moritz Gräfe will present a conference titled “Analytics based Maintenance for Offshore Wind Turbines” the 27th of November also on the Innovation Pavilion Stage. The next day, Juan Prieto Vivanco, of Minsait INDRA, will have the opportunity to share with the audience the conference “Novel monitoring and control architectures for wind generation management”. Both sessions will be moderated by ROMEO’s partner ZABALA Innovation Consulting.

The Wind Europe Offshore Conference will include a gallery of technical posters and several exhibition halls housing the entire value chain. It will also include networking and social events in order to enhance links between stakeholders.

ROMEO’s presence at the conference is part of the project commitment with the reinforcement of the links with the main European actors in the field of wind and renewable energy.

About ROMEO Project

ROMEO Project (Reliable O&M decision tools and strategies for high LCoE reduction on Offshore wind) is an initiative funded by the Horizon 2020 programme and its main objective is to reduce offshore O&M costs through the development of advanced monitoring systems and strategies, aiming to move from corrective and calendar based maintenance to a condition based maintenance, through analysing the real behaviour of the main components of wind turbines (WTGs).

The innovations developed within the R&D work packages will be tested in three use cases managed by the wind farm operators of the following projects: Teeside (United Kingdom), Wikinger (Germany) and East Anglia ONE (United Kingdom). This way, the benefits achieved will be demonstrated, and the future replication of the project in other wind farms will be ensured.

ROMEO is an industry based consortium made up of 12 recognised and experienced key players from 6 different EU member states and 1 associated country led by Iberdrola. The consortium includes large companies (EDF, Adwen, Siemens Gamesa, Ramboll, IBM Research Zurich, Minsait INDRA, Bachmann), SMEs (Laulagun Bearings, Uptime Engineering and ZABALA Innovation Consulting) and the Strathclyde University and will work jointly to benefit decision making processes of offshore WF operators.

This project is awarded by the European Commission with a Horizon2020 Programme Grant of €10 million and a total budget of approximately €16 million running for 5 years.