Empowering Wind Energy Innovation through Collaboration
The Fall 2025 meeting will take place in Ontario and will cover topics including:
- Aerodynamics
- Wind turbine aerodynamic research includes blade and rotor aerodynamics as well as wind plant and atmospheric inflow effects. The energy capture of wind farms is dependent on all aerodynamic interactions. Research is crucial to understanding how wind turbines function in large, multiple row wind farms. Such work is important because these conditions impact the cumulative fatigue damage of turbine structural components that ultimately effect the useful lifetime of wind turbines. This work also is essential for understanding and maximizing turbine and wind farm energy production.
- Asset Management
- Wind turbine asset management is the process of maintaining, overseeing, and improving wind turbines to maximize their performance and lifespan. Asset management involves planning, monitoring, and maintenance from development to operation, to end of life of the turbines. The goal is to increase profitability and reduce costs.
- Social and Environmental Integration
- Energy-related social sciences seek to better understand the interactions between humans and energy production, supply and use, in particular of the transition to a low-carbon energy system, by studying social phenomena (such as norms, values and valuations, concerns, perceptions, institutions, practices, etc.) that shape human-energy-interactions, and related fundamental issues of equity, fairness, ethics, or attribution as well as perceived annoyance.
- Wind energy projects impact their surrounding environment including greenhouse gas emissions, plants, and wildlife. These impacts vary by location and species, but birds and bats, as well as marine mammals and other marine life in the case of offshore wind energy, are of high concern when it comes to wind energy development. Understanding and reducing negative impacts to area wildlife is an important part of responsible wind energy development, whether land-based or offshore. Therefore, wind energy project developers and site operators must work to understand, avoid, and/or minimize these potential effects during all phases of a project’s life.
- Curriculum Development
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Wind energy education must be expanded to ensure a trained workforce to meet the projected growth of the wind industry and deployment. It is important to develop a wind energy knowledge base among future leaders of our communities, provinces, and nation while raising awareness about wind energy’s benefits.