Every two years, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ Wind Turbine User Group brings together original equipment manufacturers, project developers, end users, technology provides, consultancies and academics from the wind sectors to share the latest technical knowledge with engineers involved with wind turbine assets.
Frazer-Nash Consultancy is proud to play a leading role within this growing community, through Dr Graham Hawkes CEng FIMechE, Associate Director (Delivery) within the Energy and Infrastructure business unit, who chairs the User Group and the Renewable Power Committee. As delegates gear up for the third conference in the series in London on 14-15 May, Graham shares some of the expected key themes and sets out the significance of the User Group for the UK wind sector.
“The Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ (IMechE) Power Industries Board has three constituent committees: Renewable Power, Nuclear Power and Thermal Power, and Frazer-Nash has representation on all three. I have been on the Wind Turbine User Group for about two-and-a-half years now and took over as Chair last year. In solving the energy trilemma: secure, sustainable and affordable energy, there is no silver bullet, so anyone who works in the energy sector knows that we need nuclear, renewables and thermal generation. Consequently, a big focus for me is applying the Frazer-Nash collaborative mindset, which is key to help ensuring that the Renewable Power Committee focuses its activities where they are and can deliver their expertise but also recognise technical synergies and interfaces with other committees.”
“The other committees have long established conferences around ageing assets and technology. So about four years ago, the Wind Turbine User Group conference was set up as a single-track conference with a focus on the UK wind community. The target audience for the conference is people who use wind turbines, developers and operators of wind farms. The conference is an opportunity to see the wind industry from a 360 degree perspective. It isn’t a trade show or a highly technical academic conference – it’s very much about people coming together to debate, discuss, network, talk about issues, or share problems which need solving. The conference series may only be relatively young, but it’s already got a lot of momentum, and we are seeking to feel the benefit from that.”
“The conference runs over two days and we’ll be featuring everything from a bit of a state-of-the-nation view of the wind industry through to some interesting project case studies. Everyone likes a case study about the delivery of a project: it is inspiring seeing the technical or logistical challenges faced and how they are overcome, together with the sheer scale of the installed components.”
“While the topics that we will be covering are predominantly offshore wind, this year we will also be discussing floating projects. We have a particularly interesting paper from Flotation Energy about their project CENOS. This is interesting in its own right as it is the development of a commercial-scale floating wind farm but is part of the Innovation and Targeted Oil & Gas (INTOG) scheme whereby part of the energy generation will be used to decarbonise oil and gas production. This is quite interesting because while it is not possible to decarbonise the end usage of the oil and gas products the project offers the intriguing possibility of decarbonising production. This is a thought-provoking project if we think of multi-media usage of wind energy: one for electricity and one to support.”
“Another big theme for this year’s conference is end of life. This is very much about the industry saying: ‘We started building offshore wind farms around 25 years ago and now they are getting to the end of design life. So, what do we do? What’s the strategy? What approaches do we take?’ The industry wants to get answers to the big, challenging questions: do we look to justify continued operation for a few more years or do we take existing wind farms down and replace them with new ones – so called repowering. How can those decisions be made in a conceptual way and using what analytical methodology? If an operator wants to run a wind farm past its design life, how do you do that? Equally, if you make the decision to take the wind farm down, how do you do that? Over the course of the 25 years of its operation, technologies have moved on a lot, so if wind turbines are being taken down and replaced, it probably won’t just be a case of putting in the same wind turbine. We need to think completely differently from design right through to end of life.”
“We'll address this at the conference, via some great panel discussions and round table talks on improving the lifecycle sustainability of wind farms. While wind farms generate clean energy, that isn’t to say that we cannot improve the whole lifecycle impact through innovations in materials, design, operations and maintenance, decommissioning and recycling.”
Get involved
Wind Turbine User Group 2025 is open to IMechE members and non-members. Find out more: Wind Turbine User Group 2025
