GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

R&I is needed to harvest the wind energy potential, significantly enlarging the current scale and expanding the typology for a much wider range of applications, demonstrating cost-effective, safe, reliable and easy-to-handle technologies in a variety of conditions.

Overall energy efficiency strategies and architectures for the power management in large ships will be developed, with an optimised and self-adaptive operation of wind power systems as part of a hybrid architecture. For certain ship types and routes wind energy could become the main propulsion. This may in particular apply to smaller craft and fishing vessels (in transit) or to ships where wind propulsion can free bunker spaces for more paying cargo or passengers. In these cases attention needs to be given to the most practical and efficient system installation (e.g. retractable, auto-furling, hinged, multi-positional).

In addition to wind, other renewables such as solar electric systems should be considered for different ship types, to the extent they can significantly contribute to the ship’s overall power systems.