Two out of six prizes went to Risø scientists at the European Wind Energy Conference

The European Wind Energy Conference, EWEC, is a major event for all those involved in wind energy. Scientists from Risø DTU play a very important role in this conference with posters, introductory speakers and chairpersons. At the end of this year's conference held in Marseilles from 16 - 19 March two of them received prizes for their contributions: One of the four poster prizes went to scientist Andreas Bechmann. Senior scientist Rebecca Barthelmie, who is currently a guest scientist at Risø from Indiana University, received the Academy Scientific Award.

The 2009 European Academy of Wind Energy Scientific Award was given to Rebecca Barthelmie for her outstanding work and achievements on wind flows around wind turbines, particularly large-scale offshore wind turbines. Much of her work has been carried out at Risø DTU where she has been employed several times over the past 16 years.

“I very much enjoy working with people here at Risø. They have a great motivation and work really hard towards one goal – to make wind energy succeed. I feel honored to have received this award, but what drives me is to know that I in my own small way contribute to wind energy’s success as a serious part of the future energy mix, I think that is why I keep coming back,” she says.

Another important task for Rebecca Barthelmie is to be the work package leader of the “Flow and Wakes in complex terrain and offshore”- work package under the EU program Upwind. The work package includes 8 research groups from all over Europe.

Poster on the Bolund experiment with invitation to blind comparison
Andreas Bechmann had one particular thing in mind regarding his poster. It was to tell about some unique measurements of wind in complex terrain conducted by Risø scientists on the small peninsula, Bolund, in Roskilde Inlet in early 2008; at the same time he wanted to invite others to do a blind comparison of their calculation models.

And he succeeded, so well that he won one of four poster prizes on the ground that it described an experiment using quality data, it was an example of good cooperation between industry and research and the results of the project would be made available to an international benchmarking of flow modeling in complex terrain.

"Around the world there are scientists, turbine manufacturers and wind tunnel experts, each with their own modeling program. We now invite them all to test - and afterwards perhaps adjust - their programmes by means of our Bolund results. At the conference we announced all the prerequisites for the Bolund experiment, but kept the measurements secret. Now we challenge others to calculate the wind on the hill, "says Andreas Bechmann, who apart from the poster prize took home with him a large number of business cards from people who wanted to take up the challenge.


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