Research Programme

For decades now, the size of commercial wind turbines is increasing. Although it is expected that this trend of up-scaling is slowing down a little, the size of turbines, especially for offshore application, will definitely continue to grow.  

A development in recent years is the growing interest to build large reliable offshore wind farms. 

Many of the ECN Wind Energy R&D activities are related to those two developments and the overall target of increasing the performance and reducing the costs of wind energy.

ECN Wind Energy  vision
ECN Wind Energy has the vision that, based on a financial break-even point of wind onshore before 2015 and wind offshore before 2020, wind energy will supply at least 25% of the Dutch electricity demand between 2030 and 2040. Similar percentages will be realized in other countries throughout Europe and world wide. 

ECN Wind Energy’s Mission
ECN Wind Energy develops high-quality knowledge and technology for large-scale cost effective application of wind energy and transfer these to the market. 

ECN Wind Energy’s Aim
ECN Wind Energy has the ambition to contribute substantially to the objective to lower the production costs of offshore wind energy to a level at which it is competitive with fossil-fuel generation in 2020.