The project results will bring about a completely new technology to the wind energy sector, increasing the efficiency of wind turbines and reducing their noise emissions. The socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications are outlined below:
Socio-economics:
The successful project will impact socio-economics in two major aspects: i) reduced noise emissions and ii) increased energy efficiency of the wind plants. Numerical simulations, carried out in advance to the project, indicated a significant reduction of noise emission. In wind channel experiments a considerably lower noise emission was observed corroborating the numerical simulations. In areas that are densely populated, noise emission is one of the central concerns that negatively influence public acceptance of wind farms also leading to the fact that wind plants often have to be switched off at night. If this could be avoided, the project contributes to the goal “Making variable renewable electricity more predictable and grid friendly” as well as to the goal “Improving EU energy security”.
“Bringing cost of renewable energy down by increasing technology performance” will be realized by enabling to produce a new generation of rotor blades with higher energy efficiency without extra weight, leading to a new generation of high-performance rotor blades. Since the riblet technology is protected in Europe, the implementation of the technology would increase the competitiveness of the European wind industry and thus contribute to “Strengthening the European industrial technology base, thereby creating growth and jobs in Europe”.
Environment:
The most important impact of the project lies in the increase of annual power generation of wind plants by at least 6%. This performance increase will be achieved only by application of a functional coating, without the need to increase weight or to reinforce the structure of the blade. Additionally the blade sizes remain unchanged, which means that regarding transport or handling no additional effort is necessary. Thus, green energy production will be increased on a completely material- and emission-neutral basis.
Noise pollution is an important issue particularly in densely populated regions of Europe. Therefore, the envisaged noise reduction by 2 dB achieved by implementing the riblet technology is both an environmentally as well as socially important impact.
Replicability:
The target TRL of 7 of the Riblet4Wind technologies ensures that replicable results are achieved. Development of automated manufacturing technologies and application devices will enable stable and repeatable processes.
Market Transformation:
A completely new business opportunity for blade maintenance companies (mainly SMEs) will be opened in terms of retrofit of existing plants with the new coating technology. The size of this possible market is huge. In this sense the project gives a significant contribution to the goal “Nurturing the development of the industrial capacity to produce components and systems and opening of new opportunities”.
Policy:
On the whole, the achievements of Riblet4Wind significantly help to increase attractiveness of wind power on multiple levels. The various individual impacts outlined above contribute to the objective of “Solving the global climate and energy challenges” thus paving the way for policy makers to moving forward along the transition of primarily fossil- and nuclear-based to entirely renewable ways of energy generation.
