Reciprocal visit to the UK’s research centres in offshore wind energy

As a follow up to our recent UK-India workshops on offshore wind energy, I led a 2-member Indian delegation to the UK on a 4-day visit, which included pit stops at the universities in Cranfield, Durham, and Strathclyde, as well as the National Renewable Energy Centre (NAREC).
The delegation comprised Prof. V. Anantha Subramanian, Head of the Department of Ocean Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology  Madras and Mr. Rajesh Katyal, Unit Chief of Research & Development at the Centre for Wind Energy Technology.

At the University of Cranfield, we met with Prof. Feargal Brennan, Head of Offshore, Process & Energy Engineering and Dr. Maurizio Collu, who was part of the visiting UK delegation that participated in the recent workshops in India earlier this year.  Apart from stimulating discussions on the possibilities of collaborative partnerships with the Indian stakeholders, we visited the laboratories of Dr. Florent Trarieux and Dr. Athanasios Kolios. Dr Trarieux runs the Ocean Systems Test Laboratory, which provides services in experimental hydrodynamics in marine renewable energy, high speed marine vehicles, and design and instrumentation of hydrodynamic test facilities (wave tanks, towing tanks, water circulation channels). Dr. Kolios’s research includes life cycle assessment (LCA) and renewable energy technologies, integrity assessment of ageing structures, and design, analysis and operational management of offshore/marine structures, among others.

We then proceeded to visit  NAREC, located in Blyth, Northumberland, where we met with Ignacio Marti, Chief Technology Officer, and James Battensby, Technical Bid Manager. James showed us the facilities for the structural testing of turbine blades (static and dynamic fatigue), and accelerated life and extreme event testing of prototype wind and tidal energy turbines (drive train testing facilities). We also found out that an offshore anemometry hub had been installed three nautical miles offshore, which would furnish wind resource and environmental data for the proposed Blyth Offshore Wind Demonstrator Project.

On the third day of our visit, we attended the 4th General Assembly of the Supergen Wind Energy Technologies Consortium in Durham. This meeting afforded fantastic opportunities for us to network with the relevant UK academic and industry stakeholders, who were invested in the propagation of offshore wind energy technologies throughout the UK and beyond. The consortium evolved into a hub starting from the 1st April 2014, and this new organisational structure will allow international organisations to become members of the hub, and explore partnering opportunities through collaborative research projects.

The final day of the visit was spent in Glasgow. We first visited Prof. Bill Leithead, Director of the Industrial Control Centre (ICC), and Prof. David Infield at the University of Strathclyde. Bill gave us a tour of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Wind Energy Systems. The centre was filled with energetic and driven doctoral students, who had gone through a highly competitive selection process, to get admitted into the doctoral programme. Our day culminated with a memorable trip to the Whitelee Windfarm – the UK’s largest onshore windfarm. There were tall, imposing wind turbines (height = > 100 m) all around us as far as our eyes could see – about 215 turbines, in total, generating up to 539 megawatts of electricity, enough to power roughly 300,000 homes! I stood underneath a tall wind turbine and felt the magnificence of the long, rotating blades!

The visiting Indian delegates discussed several possibilities for collaborations with the aforementioned UK organisations. While the visit provided the Indian representatives with a first hand experience of the UK’s expertise and capabilities in offshore wind energy, we hope that this interaction will lead to UK-India partnerships in the near future.

“Our visit to the UK, made possible through the initiative and invitation of the UK Science & Innovation Network, was an eye-opener in many ways. We were highly impressed with the intensity of networking and collaboration between the universities and companies at the 4th General Assembly of the SUPERGEN wind consortium in Durham. Our visit also opened up the possibilities of collaborative research and exchanges between the IIT Madras, and C-WET here, and organisations in the UK – Cranfield University, Durham University and the University of Strathclyde. The testing facilities at NAREC were simply astounding! We hope that these interactions will help accelerate our national wind energy programme – both onshore and offshore. We look forward to engaging with the UK stakeholders in the near future.”
Prof. V. Anantha Subramanian, Indian Institute of Technology Madras