A leading sector

Wind is now the single largest source of renewable electricity in the European Union. According to Eurostat, in 2025 it accounted for 37.5% of renewable electricity generation in the EU [1].

That position is the result of decades of incremental research, engineering refinement and accumulated operational experience in thousands of installations. That knowledge, however, has rarely lived in one place. Data generated by one research programme stays within that programme. Methodologies developed in one institution are not easily transferred to another. The result is a sector that has grown enormously in scale while its underlying scientific infrastructure has remained fragmented.

WindLab is a response to that. Developed jointly by three EU-funded research projects, MERIDIONAL, FLOW and AIRE, it is a centralized, open-access platform where datasets, methodologies and research outcomes are deposited and made freely available.

Inside WindLab

Windlab is a searchable open data catalogue built on CKAN. It currently holds over 1,100 datasets from 27 contributing organisations, including DTU, TU Delft, Fraunhofer IWES, DNV, CENER and EDF.

The data spans the full breadth of wind energy research: wind, precipitation and blade status measurements, CFD simulations and computational meshes, SCADA operational data from real turbines, atmospheric and large-eddy simulation outputs, airborne wind energy flight recordings, wake modelling experiments and structural health monitoring datasets. It covers onshore, offshore and airborne systems across flat, complex, coastal and forest terrain. Users can filter by topic, organisation, external conditions, or specific physical variables such as wind speed, rotor speed, or air pressure, which makes it a precise tool for researchers and engineers working on specific problems.

The contributing projects

WindLab draws on the combined outputs of three EU-funded projects.

MERIDIONAL develops a validated toolchain for wind farm design, performance assessment and load prediction for onshore, offshore and airborne wind energy systems. It draws on high-fidelity simulations and field measurement campaigns.

FLOW develops prediction methods for energy production statistics and load performance of large-scale offshore and onshore wind energy systems, improving knowledge of atmospheric flow physics and the interaction between wind farm and large-scale atmospheric processes.

AIRE studies wind flows at different altitudes and under real weather conditions including precipitation and sand, which current turbine models do not account for. The project develops numerical tools and models to improve efficiency estimates and predict blade wear and turbine lifetime more accurately.

A long way to go

Renewable energy accounted for 25.2% of total EU energy consumption in 2024, against a binding target of 42.5% by 2030. According to the European Environmental Agency, “Achieving the EU minimum target of 42.5% by 2030 will require doubling average deployment rates compared with the past decade and a profound transformation of the European energy system” [2]. For wind to contribute to that at scale, the science behind it needs to advance accordingly. WindLab accelerates that process by making validated data and methodologies available as a foundation that others can build on rather than recreate.

Fonts:

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20260319-2

[2] https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/share-of-energy-consumption-from

Author: Lucía Salinas
Editor: Beatriz Méndez
May, 2026