On 25 April, more than 500 exhibitors and 14,000 participants travelled from far and wide to Copenhagen’s Bella Center to attend WindEurope’s three-day annual conference. On the ground in Denmark as the event’s official Intelligence Partner, Energy Monitor sent out a “Number of the Day” and recorded interviews with some of the wind industry’s biggest innovators and leaders.

BP: Sophie Lewis, UK head of project development support and consenting

Lewis’s excitement and confidence in BP‘s 5.2GW offshore wind plans in the UK and the US were palpable. “We’ve got a very strong heritage organisation that is used to large-scale infrastructure roll-out, so we’re really confident in our ability to be able to deliver [5.2GW of wind across the UK and US], and we have a global presence so we’re able to utilise our existing organisations to help build upon that offshore wind pipeline,” she said.

Enercon: Benjamin Seifert, regional head – central & northern Europe

Seifert pointed to promising developments in EU permitting and supply chains, and talked about Enercon‘s upskilling projects in Romania and Croatia. He also highlighted the company’s latest turbine model, the “E175 EP5 […] a mid-to-low-wind onshore turbine, which will be a very good fit for the European markets”.

World Wide Wind: Trond H Lutdal, CEO

Lutdal introduced the concept of the vertical axis rotating wind turbine which, according to World Wide Wind, is better designed to harness the potential of offshore wind than the traditional three-blade design.

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“The three propeller-type turbines – they are really meant for onshore. They are not really [built] for offshore [and are] an intrinsically poor design for floating wind specifically. So we have been thinking, on a clean sheet of paper, how should the turbine be built?”

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World Wide Wind turbines are at the prototype stage.

Elia Group: Johan Maricq, head of digital accelerators

Sparky, the fully automated cyber-dog, sat in on this interview. Maricq explained that Sparky is a “combination of innovation and digitalisation that we want to use either offshore on an offshore platform or on our energy islands, [to] be used to do autonomous inspection in combination with the human inspection so that we can be more efficient.”

“[Sparky] can also stay on the island or on the offshore platform because access to an offshore platform is often difficult: you don’t know about the weather, [if] you need to have a boat, or you need to have a helicopter at your disposal. With this technology, [it can stay] on-site and automatically do its rounds. If there’s an anomaly detected, [Sparky] contacts the onshore people that can remotely take control of the robot, which can both do manual work and collect data.”

Editor’s note: If you work in the wind industry and are interested in more market insights via our parent company GlobalData and/or want to discuss a targeted lead generation or outreach campaign, please contact Joe Roberts (joe.roberts@verdict.co.uk) to learn more about our award-winning AI-based marketing solution.