ROMEO continues to build reliable O&M strategies to reduce costs on offshore wind and showcases progresses in key events
Two years after the flagship European project ROMEO kicked off, the leading consortium of the initiative gathered together in the Austrian city of Feldkirch on 4th and 5th of June, in order to analyse the main advances achieved and with the aim to discuss the next steps required for the success of this project backed by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission. Bachmann headquarters, one of ROMEO's consortium partners, were the scenario of the General Assembly, a meeting that gave the different partners the opportunity to show their progress and coordinate actions to continue the scheduled roadmap. The meeting was focused on the technical progresses made by the partners to meet the goals of the project, especially on the predictive models developed to achieve a high reduction of levelized cost of energy (LCoE) on offshore wind production. The event started with a welcome made by César Yanes, ROMEO Project coordinator at Iberdrola, who was in charge of introducing the agenda of the event. Presentations were carried out by the WP5 leader of the Project Indra, followed by an administrative session on WP10. After that, ZABALA led the exploitation workshop sharing the main cornerstones of stakeholder mapping. The second day of the Assembly started with the Technical Committee Meeting and was followed by the rest of the technical sessions. Adwen/Siemens Gamesa, Iberdrola/Scottish Power, IBM Research Zurich, Ramboll, Uptime, and the Strathclyde University made their presentations and shared with the rest of the partners the main progresses achieved. Meanwhile, ZABALA presented the Report on Dissemination and Communication and Activities of the project. The meeting also included an open space for discussions and a meeting wrap-up. All the partners had the opportunity to know first-hand the work carried out by Bachmann in the sector, visiting their laboratories located in its headquarters. Two years of achievements The partners had the chance to exchange points of views and ideas and set down a comprehensive overview of the project's progress. Among the most important conclusions of the meeting was the progress that has been registered in all technical work packages. The assembly was also profitable to detail the new challenges that the ROMEO project will face in the future. Work package leaders also underlined the importance of interacting with other stakeholders of the wind sector through participation in major events such as the Wind Europe Conference and Exhibition, the most important event in Europe for the wind industry that took place last April in Bilbao. In fact, the ROMEO project was successfully presented during that event, that held together an average of 8,000 professionals attending from all over the world and over 400 exhibitors from 50 countries. Recently, ROMEO was successfully showcased in the REMS Annual Conference "Optimisation of Offshore Wind Structures", organized by the University of Strathclyde. Next meeting point will be the Wind Energy Science Conference 2019 foreseen in Cork, Ireland (17th - 20th of June), and considered a multi-disciplinary open forum for discussion where delegates can explore the latest developments in wind energy science, spot emerging trends and identify future collaborators.