WeDoWind meets Game Changers

At the Wind Energy Innovation Division of the Institute for Energy Technology at the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences, we are happy to announce an exciting new collaboration this summer with the "Game Changer" programme of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK.

In order to nurture the next generation of researchers, an inclusive internship program was created to demystify research and ensure that the opportunities of academia are open to all. Over the past five years, Game Changers has hosted a total of 24 internships, recruited talented students from three universities, worked directly with renewable energy industry partners, and helped a total of five interns become PhD students in Strathclyde, while assisting others in securing graduate positions. The interns' research is not only a valuable experience, but also leads to significant outputs such as publications and industrially used software. The internship program includes involvement with a Strathclyde research team and participation in specially designed research skills workshops. The recruitment process has been intentionally designed to recruit a wide range of applicant:s. It is hoped that the best practices developed here will contribute to improvements in recruitment across the University.

WeDoWind is a framework that enables and motivates people from academia and industry, as well as other stakeholders, to collaborate and share and manage data and knowledge in a secure environment, creating a mutually beneficial win-win situation (Figure 1). The method is based on industry-provided "Challenges" coordinated through digital "Spaces." Several digital "Spaces" form industry-specific ecosystems of collaborators. The method provides added value to any person who wants to either define or solve a "Challenge". The former receive an innovative solution for a "Challenge". The latter have the opportunity to be part of an international community, to gain experience by working with complex data or to develop and test new methods on previously inaccessible data sets. For example, Cubico Sustainable Investments recently published two SCADA datasets for the Kelmarsh and Penmanshiel (UK) wind farms. Several "Challenges" related to these data sets have already been defined, which are being worked on using the WeDoWind framework in the "Cubico Open Data Exploration (CODE) Space".

With the project "WeDoWind meets GameChangers" we are bringing the "GameChangers" internship program together with a WeDoWind challenge for the first time.

In this collaboration, which will take place over the summer, two research-interested and motivated students are sought to work together to solve real-world data-driven challenges from industry in the field of wind energy. Each student will work at a different partner university and will be supported by experts from the respective host institution to make a concrete contribution within the project. Besides the two partner universities OST and Strathclyde University in Glasgow, UK, the organisations Cubico Sustainable Investments, UK, and Texas A&M University, USA, are accompanying this project. Cubico Sustainable Investments is continuously looking for new and exciting ways to use their data. Therefore, this collaborative project was designed to be mutually beneficial to both the participants and the challenge provider.

Interested students will have the opportunity to work closely with professionals at their host institutions, have access to real wind turbine data, and actively contribute to important ongoing research. In return, Cubico Sustainable Investments will be provided with a variety of interesting and useful inputs and solutions to their problems.