Wind Energy Needs More Than Wind
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Dr. Dennis Bosse heads the Center for Wind Power Drives Aachen GmbH on Campus Melaten – and makes the case at the Tech Impact Festival for why wind turbines today are measured primarily by their behavior in the power grid.
Between Test Bench and Podium
Dr. Dennis Bosse is Managing Chief Engineer of the Center for Wind Power Drives (CWD) on Campus Melaten. The CWD is part of the Cluster Heavy Duty Drives – one of seven research clusters in which teams of scientists and industry partners work closely together. Cooperation with industry is not a secondary aspect but a structural principle: at the CWD, research questions arise in direct engagement with industrial requirements.
At the Tech Impact Festival 2025, Bosse appears in two formats. In the session "Wind Power Systems and Grid Integration," the mechanical engineer gives a presentation on modularization and testing strategies in wind drivetrain technology. In the subsequent panel "Advances in Wind Turbine Technology and Grid Integration," he discusses the current state and next steps in wind energy with Andreas Weber (Vestas) and Dr. Ralf Hambrecht (Winergy Flender). For Dennis Bosse, the festival offers an opportunity to present the research work in Aachen to the broader energy community and to demonstrate that wind energy is also an industrially anchored topic here: "Many of the truly relevant questions today come from industry – and that is precisely why we as researchers must be present where these questions are being asked."
Replicating the Field in the Laboratory
At the heart of the research infrastructure is the 4-megawatt system test bench. It can load the complete drivetrain of a wind turbine – rotor shaft, gearbox, generator – as if the turbine were standing out in the wind. The principle is called hardware-in-the-loop: the physical component is embedded in a simulation environment that calculates in real time what forces the turbine would be exposed to under real operating conditions. On the rotor side, a large motor takes over the simulation of wind loads; on the grid side, a synthetic electrical grid feeds the turbine with realistic fault scenarios. The drivetrain receives the same signals as in the field, but in a controlled, repeatable manner and without the risk of failure.
This is also industrially relevant because wind turbines today are no longer permitted to simply shut down when the grid fluctuates. In the past, a turbine would reflexively disconnect at frequency deviations in order to protect itself.
In a modern power grid with a high share of renewable energies, this would be fatal: if all turbines were to disconnect simultaneously, this would amplify the instability rather than dampen it. Turbines today must do the opposite – and the test bench at the CWD makes precisely this behavior testable.
The automation for this operation was developed at the Institute of Automatic Control. The grid compliance tests were developed in close collaboration with Prof. Antonello Monti (E.ON ERC Automation of Complex Power Systems) and Prof. Rik de Doncker (E.ON ERC Institute for Power Generation and Storage Systems), both on the same Campus, less than 500 meters away.
What Research Can Become
The impact of the work at the CWD beyond the campus is reflected in concrete results. Vestas, Europe's largest wind turbine manufacturer, adopted the hardware-in-the-loop automation developed at the test bench for the operation of its own, even more powerful test rigs. From the same research work, the spin-off conatys GmbH was founded by Dr. Uwe Jassmann. It was later acquired by one of the world's leading providers of wind turbine testing technology and is now part of R&D Test Systems.
Across Europe, there are only a few test benches of this kind: one in Aachen, one in Bremerhaven, and others in the United Kingdom and Denmark. The fact that one of them is located on Campus Melaten and operated there in conjunction with several institutes and in direct exchange with industry is the result of a research infrastructure designed for industrial applicability.
How Collaboration Works at the CWD
The CWD is a good example of how collaboration between science and industry works. Companies are not external clients but part of the research process: they bring specific technical questions, work with teams of scientists on solutions, and have direct access to the infrastructure, including the test bench. This requires both sides to communicate as equals, and it requires the necessary tools to be on site. At the CWD, work is conducted in an interdisciplinary manner. Institutes responsible for different aspects of a problem are located in close proximity. This not only shortens distances – it changes how quickly and how precisely results can be produced.
The Tech Impact Festival offers the opportunity to meet Dr. Dennis Bosse and the work of the CWD directly. Those who wish to discuss testing strategies, grid integration, or a collaboration in the field of wind energy will find a concrete point of contact there.
