Abstract

A talk on the wind industry given by Jim Platts, a leading researcher in wind turbine technology for many years.

Few people in the UK understand the necessary scale of the wind energy industry – a major global industry that installed over 40GW of electricity generating capacity last year alone and is used to growing at over 25% pa. Nor do many people understand the necessary scope and technical complexity of the offshore wind farm / electricity grid projects that will be the growth area of wind energy globally over the next decade.

As one of the original network who formed the global wind energy industry in the 1980s, our speaker Jim Platts created the designs, the manufacturing processes, the team and the company that makes all the large wind turbine blades in the UK, now the global blade technology development centre of Vestas, the largest of the wind turbine manufacturing companies, on the Isle of Wight.

In this talk, Jim Platts will outline the nature of the industry within which UK industry must earn its place if it wants to take part.

Dr Jim Platts is a lecturer in the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge (www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/people/mjp/). He has taken a leading role in the design and development of both the wind turbine blades and the manufacturing processes to make them since the 1980s, and continues to be involved in advanced wind turbine design and development.