Hello. Can you hear me well? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, good morning, everybody. Also from my side, my name is Stephanie Toms. I work from Airborne Wind Europe,

and also the honor to co-organize that event, like this. And therefore, it's also now my pleasure to introduce

our first keynote speaker to you, so a true wind energy professional, the manager of 4Wind since 2008,

and here today as the chairman of the IEA Wind TCP. The IEA, as you know, is an independent part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, advises member governments in energy issues.

And the TCP is for the development and the commercialization of wind technology is a very important part. And therefore, yeah, we are happy to have you here now. Please welcome Dr. Stefan Bart.

All right. Yeah, good morning. Thank you for having me to the organizers. I'm happy to be in Milan and to talk a bit about Wind TCP. On the previous slides from the gentleman from the ministry, you have seen several on one slide, several boxes, and one of them was IEA TCPs.

And I would like to explain a bit to you what that is and why you should be involved in that. So the IEA currently has approximately 40 TCPs, and it really is gathering the group from governments, industries, international organization, NGOs,

research, so every part of the sector. And that makes it special because in the usual settings where you are in research or as a company, it's not that the nations, the ministries are directly involved sitting at the same table

and developing with you to gather strategies on how to move forward. It goes back quite a while. It started during another energy crisis four and a half decades ago, and probably has the longest history of documented wind energy technology development. So if you're ever interested, what happens over the years

in different countries all over the world, you can have a look at our annual reports. It's also funny to see who started all that. If you look at the first reports, it's not renewable institutes. Of course, it's nuclear institutes looking into this new comer and if that could have a chance or not.

At the moment, we have 22 members being part of IEA Wind. Most of that, as Lorenzo said, is based in Europe because that is where the wind really started. And then in America, it's Canada and the United States. We're currently discussing with some countries

in Central and South America to come on board. Then we have countries in Asia, India, Japan, South Korea, and we have two sponder organizations. That is also a structure within IEA that is possible. These are the two industry associations. We are the Chinese Wind Energy Association and Wind Europe,

which obviously are quite important, covering a very large part of the market. What is driving us? You have seen, especially for Italy, PV obviously is quite an important technology and also if you look globally, PV is very important.

You might have also seen statements from IEA's headquarters. PV will be the new king in the energy sector. Still, we believe that wind will lead the global transition to decarbonize energy supply and the reason is that wind can provide really quite a lot of ancillary services and especially if you look

at producing hydrogen in large amounts than wind and offshore wind, obviously is some important element and that is why we see this is a vision that is reasonable. How we want to do that? By collaboration, international collaboration on wind energy research, promote the high impact

wind energy has. And international collaboration here because the challenges are so big that no single country, no single institute will be able to tackle all these topics.

We have to work together and bundle all resources we have to achieve that. More concrete, the four strategic objectives we have that we want to maximize the value of wind energy, not the price tag, the value.

Value is more than money. It's not only what are you getting in as a profit, it is also employment, wealth of the community, how it's integrated in the ecological system. So it's bigger than just money but of course money is an important element. If it's not at a price tag that you can afford it,

then we will get in trouble. So getting the costs down obviously is still an important topic. You heard that in the speech of the executive vice-rector of this university,

technical research alone is not everything. You also have to do some social science research. So nothing will materialize if your technology is not accepted by the public and nothing will materialize if you can't integrate it in an ecological fitting way. So we have to work on that as well

and again we do that by really international collaboration and exchange of best practices and data. That is grouped in five research priorities. First one is the fuel, the wind itself, the resource and site characterization and external conditions. Then of course the technology

is an extremely important element. Going bigger from wind farms to wind farm clusters and integrating that in the energy systems that obviously is also an important element. Then again social, environmental and economic impacts and also communication, education and engagement.

We have to transfer the message and we have to motivate students to go to this area and study courses and work in that field. Otherwise we will have a significant bottleneck in skilled personnel to do so. This is our current task portfolio.

I don't expect you to read that in detail. This is how that is grouped over time. Shout out to Airborne Wind Europe which is one of the newer ones sitting in advanced technology obviously. And to explain a bit how we come to topics and how we decide what is the future road

we want to follow. We're organizing topical expert meetings and this is a bit of special thing. It's not a regular workshop or conference where you can go to if you're just interested. It is really selected by your country representatives and then those people from ministries decide also

these are my experts in my country and I want to send them to that expert meetings to discuss with all the other international experts. These are the most recent ones. Usually this leads to the development of a new task. This is how we work. Not all of them.

Sometimes there are topics that are like aviation systems, commutation. This is sometimes where the air traffic controller requested some input and then we organized an expert's workshop there that did not materialize into a dedicated task but for instance the 10-1-2, the Airborne Wind that came to task 48.

And probably I guess some of you are involved in that task here. To start it, you need some critical mass. So two examples here, Airborne Wind and I really like this stamp of the Netherlands so I think this is also a great way of communication

so get the technology to the public, make them aware of that in different, maybe not straightforward ways. So you need some critical mass and two more recent technologies, Airborne Wind and floating are good examples because they have been around for quite some time

and there have been activities here and there but it needed some time so that several countries decided okay, it looks like it could be something that is really, will have an impact in the energy system and now we start really working on that. Another thing you might have heard is the grand challenges

in wind energy. That is a time that we organized a few years back and that led to the science article where we communicated what is really necessary looking on a long term in research,

where do we have to go, where are missing gaps and this again is a way to transfer these messages to the policy makers and funding agency, giving them a hint and advice where they should invest the research monies. The grand challenges that have been identified

by this large group of experts are threefold. Again, it's understanding the wind and this is probably very unique for a technology that we have to cover an enormous range of scales. It's not possible to develop wind turbines or wind turbine technology or in your case,

not a turbine, wind technology without really understanding all scales and how they are connected and if you go from the weather systems to really the flow over a kite or a rotor blade on a millimeter scale, this really is a challenge

to have all these models and then connect those models that they work properly. Then handling the dynamics and design of skyscraper size machines on land and offshore is apparently a challenge by itself. These are the biggest rotating dynamic machines ever built

and how to do that in a proper way is absolutely not straightforward and then integrating that in an energy system, you really have to understand how that works and its entire complexity and handling the dynamics also on a very broad range and on time scales.

Those of you who have been in Delft for the talk conference a few weeks ago have seen that permit that Paul Weers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the United States presented there and I think it's a very nice way of presenting

what the status of knowledge is. So when we started with a rotor, I'm understanding that the next is the turbine itself and then trying to see how you can reduce costs and make it cheap, then next thing is to take several turbines, build wind farm

or wind farm cluster and now we are at a level that policy makers expect us to build energy systems and all that should work super reliable at super low costs and the issue with R&D funding on these challenges

is that there's only limited amount of money available and there is a tendency of policy makers to see, well, the new topic is this hydrogen, so let's put a lot of money there. That's great and it's also important but they take that money away from research areas where they think, well, that's done,

there's no further research needed and that's probably a dangerous way because for wind itself, we use now models and theories that have not been made for these size of machines and clusters and energy systems so there is stretching them to an area where they probably should not be used

at least without questioning that. So there is research needed still to understand and that also holds for airborne wind systems. It's not that you can just say, well, we don't have to do any research on generators, we have done that forever so why should we look into that? Well, how hard can it be to have a kite on a cable?

So why would you need to do some research there? So this is the mindset of some funding agencies and I think it's important again that we tell that story, explain in detail why there are things that look simple but they're absolutely not. But then this again is all technical

and if you take that pyramid and turn it left and right, you see an element that has to do with ecological aspects and also social impacts and you have to look into that and if we look at the more conventional turbine technology, when that sector started to look,

really seriously looking into social sciences and add that group or involve that group, motivate them to come to conferences and work with us together on these topics, that happened probably very late and I can only encourage you, do not repeat that mistake in airborne wind and looking at the conference program of this conference,

I found one presentation on social sciences from Helen and Schmidt from TU Delft. So that should make you think, is that the right balance or how do we get the other scientists and faculties from social sciences involved?

It is absolutely necessary, nothing will materialize if the society is not accepting the technology. These grand challenges have been missing elements and one example is social sciences and we got complaints from that community

so we do now a series of secrets. Every few years, we will organize this topical expert meeting on grand visions and grand challenges for wind to look what have we missed, what's new, what has changed and really providing a global forum where all the roadmaps that are out there

been written by the European Academy, European Energy Research Alliance, by the US scientific community and so on. Bring that together, take that and then work together and say, okay, what really on a low global scale are the missing elements we have to work on?

Why should you get involved? If you're not part of the task 48 yet, go to the operating agents, ask them how you can participate. It is a really unique forum because this mix of research industry

but also sponsor organizations and governments that are coming together. It's not that you work on your, you get funding, you do your research project and then you write a final report and that's it. It really is in a direct connection with them and that is kind of unique. It also is a recognized and trusted body

for pre-standards and best practices. So if you need something that might become an IEC standard but you need something before where the industry can agree on, then IEA is a great way to do that because the industry is used and also the big developers are used to IEC standards and best practices.

So I can encourage you to work on that. What is special, you cannot get money. It's not a funding source. You have to bring your own resources. That might sound weird but the advantage is only people that are motivated are working there. So you don't have people coming up, showing up,

getting money, you don't seem to see them again for the entire project time. They come back when the final report is due. People are coming together because they're motivated to work on these topics. And well, it is flexible. So if, although the task is already running, you still can join.

You can also leave during a task. Don't take it too formally. If you're interested, get involved. Ask the operating agent or the secretariat or me or the other vice chairs how to get involved and if you want to have further details on that. How you can do that? Well, LinkedIn obviously is one source. Our website is another source.

We find all this information and there's also the source where you can download the annual reports, the best practices and other reports itself. And that's in a nutshell very quick, a very complicated structure actually if you look in details or try to make it as simple as possible, IEA, WIND, GCP.

Thank you very much for your attention. Yeah, thank you Stefan very much. We'll have a little time later also for Q&A in our panel where Stefan will also be take part.