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The Importance of Developing Renewable Energy in Europe

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In recent years, Europe has been faced with the problem of continuous urbanization and excessive energy consumption, closing in on exhaustion of available energy resources. In view of this, the notions of sustainability and resilience have become paramount in resource management and policy-making. Within such a context, renewable energies play a key role in the global energy pool. Amongst these, wind energy production accounts for almost half (43%) of the global generating capacity [1]. Nonetheless, despite its obvious merits, the “Big Wind industry” comes with a number of potential shortcomings largely relating to the short life-span of these components and the lack of efficient operation and maintenance (Ο&Μ) planning schemes. The latter …show more content…

Problem-specific, cost-benefit analyses have not been conducted in detail, in order to provide significant indications that the benefits of SHM systems outweigh their cost. In this respect, one should mind that stakeholders, managers and infrastructure operators need simple and reliable tools in the form of “yes/no actions”, or “green/red buttons”. Unavoidably, this implies that SHM systems should be transformed from complex research-oriented measurement campaigns into robust, integrated solutions that accompany the structure throughout its life-cycle. Our goal is to address the aforementioned bottlenecks, maximizing the return on investment for such facilities by extending the useable lifetime through a smart monitoring implementation. In a nutshell, the proposed project has the following main objectives: 1. We will propose a new monitoring paradigm for WT facilities which features optimal sensor placement, i.e., minimally used instrumentation for extraction of the necessary amount of key response quantities in an effort to track these systems from cradle-to-grave. 2. Based on this sensory feedback and data collection, we will develop data processing methodologies relying on SHM, for the extraction of metrics for LCA both in the short term (damage, anomalies and extreme events detection) and in the long-term (deterioration, fatigue and defective

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