Nabrawind Technologies, a Sodena-owned company that designs and develops advanced wind energy technologies for wind turbines, has benefited from the EU Horizon 2020 SME Instrument program, which will grant financing to the Navarrese company worth 1.7 million Euros.
The wind power project presented by Nabrawind was successfully defended on 9 July in Brussels before an international court specializing in investments. The jury, representing the European Commission, assessed the potential of XXL wind towers and modular blades in response to logistic barriers that threaten to limit the growth of the wind power sector.
This concession is a great achievement for the company, since the success rate of this program is only 4% of projects funded with respect to the more than 2000 applications submitted in each call.
These Horizon 2020 funds will serve Nabrawind to boost the entry into the market of its two technologies, the Nabralift self-rising tower, which can exceed 200 meters high, and the Nabrajoint modular shovel joint, which simplifies transportation of blades of more than 70 m in length.
In 2018, the company installed a 160 m high prototype, the tallest wind tower in Spain, in Eslava, and completed the real-scale tests of its union for modular blades. Recently, it was announced that in 2020 it will also install the tallest tower in Africa with 144 m high. But the challenge posed to the European Commission is even more ambitious. Nabrawind Technologies intends to exceed 200 m high with this aid, becoming the wind roof worldwide.
Eneko Sanz, general director of Nabrawind, highlights, in addition to the importance of the amount that Nabrawind will receive, the fact that “the European Commission joins those who believe that the future of wind energy goes through the transition to high-rise wind turbines and power, and the implementation of modular blades to overcome the logistical challenges facing the sector ”. In this line, he expresses his conviction that Nabrawind products “will contribute to eliminate the logistic restrictions of onshore wind energy, so that in the near future the terrestrial wind turbines will have the same dimensions and power as the marine wind turbines, whose turbines are today up to four times more powerful ”.
Likewise, Sanz thanked the H2020 program, which has positively valued Nabrawind’s proposal, as well as the consulting firm Bantec Group, “which has advised and helped us throughout the process.”
H2020 SME INSTRUMENT
Phase II of the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument (EIC Accelerator), from which Nabrawind has been a beneficiary, is an instrument of the European Commission created with the objective of promoting European SMEs that with their activity promote the technological and competitive development of Europe in certain strategic sectors, including energy transition. The fund is endowed with 80,000 million euros for the 2014-2020 six-year period and its demanding evaluation systems mean that only 4% of the more than 2,000 applications submitted in this edition have received funding.
NABRAWIND ANSWERS THE SECTOR’S NEEDS
Nabrawind Technologies S.L. It is a Navarre company founded in 2015 in Pamplona. The initial workforce had 15 senior engineers from the main companies in the sector in order to develop two patents requested by the promoters in the parent company Nabrawind S.L.
Nabrawind Technologies, has tried to respond since its foundation to one of the main threats to the development of wind energy: the growth of wind turbines. The best locations for wind farms are already exploited and 90% of the new sites will be constituted, in less than five years, by parking in places with lower intensity winds, class III and IV.
This concession is a great achievement for the company, since the success rate of this program is only 4% of projects funded with respect to the more than 2000 applications submitted in each call.
