Energy and Resources – Renewable Energy

In Germany, wind energy is the number one renewable power source. Offshore wind farms in particular require innovation, since they must be planned and built to withstand the wear of wind, water, salt, UV rays and waves over the 20 years or so of their service lives. Photovoltaic systems and solar thermal systems are what allow us to harness the sun’s energy for our use. Fraunhofer researchers are hard at work trying to make these systems even more efficient. Meanwhile, Germany now has a significant market for biomass energy and one of the primary aims of modern biotechnology is finding a way to produce biomass efficiently.

The European Project SUNRISE, “Solar energy for a circular economy”, has been selected as one of the six Coordination and Support Actions (CSA) within the Horizon 2020 programme. Funded with €1M, it will last one year (starting in spring 2019), setting the basis for a European large scale research project.

The SUNRISE Vision is a radical and ambitious scientific and technological approach for solar energy conversion and storage to provide a sustainable alternative to fossil-based, energy-intensive production of fuels and base chemicals. This is fully aligned with the recently released European Commission long-term strategy for a climate neutral Europe by 2050.

SUNRISE joins together stakeholders from academia, industry, policy and society, including NGOs and global players in the energy, chemicals and automotive sectors, to develop the S&T roadmap of a large research initiative in the Energy, Environment and Climate Change area.

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"Energiewende": An energy transition. Over 2000 Fraunhofer staff members are researching the widest possible variety of technologies in order to make sure that in the future more electricity enters power grids from renewable sources. One example is the concentrator solar cell.

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The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, Soitec, CEA-Leti and the Helmholtz Center Berlin jointly announced today having achieved a new world record for the conversion of sunlight into electricity using a new solar cell structure with four solar subcells. Surpassing competition after only over three years of research, and entering the roadmap at world class level, a new record efficiency of 44.7% was measured at a concentration of 297 suns.

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The acronym WInD-Pool stands for Windenergy-Information-Data-Pool. It is a common knowledge base of the wind industry. It is obvious that reliability of wind turbines and subassemblies needs to be improved. Otherwise, availability, especially for offshore application, will not reach suitable results. Improvements have to be achieved in the design of turbines as well as in the organization of maintenance. To do so, it is crucial that the experiences gained in the past will be used as efficiently as possible.

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As part of the “Future rotor blade concept” research project, scientists at Fraunhofer IWES are developing new methods to test rotor blade prototypes that provide significantly more realistic data and allow a load-appropriate design to be produced. At the conclusion of the first phase of the research project, which will take five years in total, the infrastructure will be operational and the test methods developed to significantly reduce energy production costs.

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