As techniques for the manufacture of large wind turbines (with rotor diameter over 150 m) and offshore installation become mature, wind as a clean and renewable alternative to fossil fuels has become an increasingly important contributor to the energy portfolio. Annual energy production by wind turbines has reached around 5% of worldwide electricity usage, and 10.4% in the EU, at the end of 2016. The EU’s current target is to reach 31% by 2030. Brazil, the collaborator of HPCWE, has the 9th largest wind capacity in the world and is experiencing over 10% annual growth with nearly 500 wind farms already deployed.
The goal of HPCWE is to address key challenges for wind energy technologies to benefit from state-of-the-art HPC by exploring academic and industrial collaborations between Europe and Brazil. The HPCWE consortium consists of 11 partners including 2 HPC centers, 7 top academic institutes and 2 leading enterprises from six European countries and Brazil, with proven track records on HPC hardware, wind energy, numerical methods, software developments and industrial applications. HPCWE aims at establishing an EU-Brazil network, coordinating the action of universities, companies and consultancies with complementary expertise, to build and test beyond-state-of-the-art HPC strategies for the numerical simulation of wind flow in wind energy exploitation. Four objectives have been subsequently identified:
Objective 1: Efficient use of HPC resources in the simulation of flow around a wind turbine across all relevant operating conditions.
Objective 2: Accurate scale-integration in wind energy beyond state-of-the-art
Objective 3: Improved I/O for adjoint-based optimization
Objective 4: To build new partnerships between EU and Brazil for the application of HPC in the wind energy sector.
Towards the end of the project, HPCWE will deliver a step change in the application of HPC on wind flow simulations and will reshape almost every stage of wind energy exploitation. The success of HPCWE will also bridge the current discipline boundaries between the underlying scientific areas (fundamental fluid physics, wind energy, high-order numerical methods and atmosphere science, etc.).
