GROW enters next phase
GROW, a consortium of leading offshore wind industry and research partners, started as a six-years innovation programme. Yesterday, 12 October, GROW partners signed a renewed programme agreement and will continue their innovation activities to 2030.
They keep working together to reduce offshore wind costs and increase the value of wind energy in the energy system and the ecosystem. Furthermore, Fugro, GBM Works, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and TotalEnergies have joined the consortium, which will further strengthen the innovative power of the programme. Almost the entire offshore wind value chain is represented within GROW. Working together and sharing knowledge in this long-term and dedicated RD&D partnership, GROW’s strength lies in its ability to run focused, sequential, and complementary RD&D activities. By exploiting synergies between projects, innovations can be faster and more efficiently commercialised.
In the past years, GROW started nineteen projects with a value of about USD 58 million. Projects range from increasing the yield of a wind farm to improving the installation practices and technologies for the foundations of very large wind turbines. GROW creates the visibility of these projects and the partners involved by showing the innovative capacity of the Dutch offshore wind sector. GROW also represents the interest of its partners related to innovation policies and measures in offshore wind and stimulates cooperation with small and medium enterprises and higher education. The fast developments in offshore wind deployment require further innovations for system integration, multi-use, ecology, floating wind technology and so forth. In addition, GROW wants to introduce or intensify a cooperation framework for access to data needed for innovation, and to explore the options to develop on- and offshore demonstration and test site(s).
The parties that signed the programme agreement are Ampelmann, Boskalis, Deltares, DOT, Eneco, Fugro, GBM Works, IHC, LM Windpower, MARIN, RWE, Seaway7, Shell, Siemens Gamesa, Sif, TNO, TotalEnergies, TU Delft, Van Oord, and Vattenfall. David de Jager, Director of GROW, says, “We evaluated the programme of the past years, and our partners stated that they wanted to continue with their activities within GROW. They find it important to collectively approach the issues in a multi-disciplinary way to find the best solutions for the great-scale operations we work with. You cannot work alone: to innovate successfully, you must cooperate with partners across the supply chain. And by working together within GROW, with partners with different expertise, different views and by sharing data and experiences of the whole supply chain, we can accomplish much more.”