Wingy Pro is the acronym for "Increasing efficiency of wind power plants for the production of energy", a Colaborative type of project supported by the European Comission.
The wind energy market was and still is growing very fast. In 2007, wind power capacity in the EU increased by another 8.5 GW, and provides today 3.7 % of the EU electricity demand. However, on average, wind power capacity needs to increase by 9.5 GW per year over the next 12 years to reach in 2020 the EU anticipated 180 GW, which would be 12‑14 % of EU electricity demand. To reach the goal three alternatives exists:
- increase the number of installed wind turbines
- increase the power output per wind turbine
- increase the efficiency of wind energy production
Ideally these alternatives go hand in hand to gain the maximum possible energy output from future wind energy systems. The largest wind turbines installed reached an output of 6 MW. However, with the current generator technologies a further significant growth in power becomes a difficult task to meet due to the enormous weight and size of these generators.
Within this framework, Wingy-Pro aims to make a scale up of the existing 8.7 kNm (50 kW) transverse flux generator to 320 kNm (1 MW), to get it validated and finally installed into a medium/large size wind turbine for further testing and demonstration.
A successful Wingy-Pro project will open up the possibility of increasing the generated power in currently existing spaces by the integration of a cost-efficient system.