Archive - CrossWind Newsletter Ready for the new phase

As the first year of the CrossWind project draws to a close, it’s time to look back on where we stand, what we have accomplished and look forward to what’s next. Upon reflection, we can say that this year had it all; many opportunities and considerable challenges!

Back to overview

08/12/2021

Most of the design work is behind us and we are able to move on to manufacturing and production according to the original schedule. Even though there has been a slight delay in the granting procedure, the HKN permit is now irrevocable. With concerted, focused effort by the whole team we have managed to maintain our original schedule nevertheless. We are very proud of how we identified and worked on the opportunities as well as weathered the challenges together. Meanwhile, our Innovations group has made some great progress in the five Innovation packages.

In this newsletter, we would like to look back on a turbulent year and give you a behind the scenes look at how we work together to have CrossWind up and running by the end of 2023.

We Deliver

We sat down with Ronald and had a chat on the first year at CrossWind.

“What really sets CrossWind apart, I believe, is its capability to connect all the partners and stakeholders to realise one big, dedicated and efficient team. We use a buddy system to maintain short direct communication lines in cross-company collaborations. That means that an electrical engineer from Siemens Gamesa can contact her/his counterpart at CrossWind to directly share thoughts.

That makes us really flexible and fast as a project, especially from the moment that we received the irrevocable permit. We caught up with our original schedule despite an initial delay.

What I like about this job so much? It’s an incredible puzzle. Connecting not only the technical dots, but also connecting all the stakeholders and involved people. The entire team are aligned to realise cross-company win-win-win situations and creating an optimal design over the full life cycle of the project. That’s what makes me tick.

Looking back at some milestones... We’ve created a One Team culture with our stakeholders despite challenging (COVID) working environment, completed the certification for the turbine (Rotor Nacelle Assembly) the tower and foundations and are geared up to start fabrication.

What my favourite innovation is from the main five? I definitely choose the offshore production of hydrogen as this enables a next step in further developing the value chain of offshore renewable energy.”

Read the full interview with Roeland.

We Innovate

What an exciting and rewarding year it has been! We, the Innovations workstream of CrossWind, are on a mission; we are working hard on our commitment to demonstrate that offshore wind can be flexible. Recognising that great results can only be achieved through collective efforts, we have teamed up with several contractors, research institutes and universities and we have had quite an astonishing progress in 2021!

Let me start with our Battery and Hydrogen storage facility, the so-called Baseload Power Hub: we have finished together with Shell Global Solutions the Concept Select phase. There, we captured the competitive concept which was then further developed in a Basis for Design. In this process, we also approached the market so we got a good grip of what the capacity and capabilities in this space are. Our aim is to start the Front End Engineering Design of the project next year, how exciting!

Our activities with TNO, are also in full swing for the floating solar project. We have approached various system suppliers and we are now in the process of assessing the floating solar concepts. In the meantime, we are also developing reliability tests for the different solar panel and inverter components. Our aim is to select the system supplier next year.

Together with TU Delft, we have started working on “addressing the wake effects” and under the supervision of Professor Jan-Willem van Wingerden, two PhD students have already started working on the topic. With TU Delft we are also collaborating on the system integration project. In this project, the successful PhD candidate will work under the supervision of Professor Simon Watson in a project that aims to investigate and optimise the full system impact of our solutions, ahead of their wider future adoption.

Last but not least, with Siemens Gamesa we also have progressed with the engineering of the active filtering, the inertia response and the self-sustained turbines.

To conclude, I would say, stay tuned and watch this space since we will be providing regular updates.

We Share

CrossWind is all about working together as one team and sharing knowledge with the world. CrossWind is getting support from multiple researchers, PhDs and interns. We’re proud to introduce three of them in a special mention on LinkedIn recently: Fay de Waal, Emanuel Taschner and Mees van Vondelen. Their research concerns the possibility of recycling windturbines (Fay), examining wake behaviour behind the turbines (Emanuel) and optimising and designing control algorithms for the windpark (Mees).