Summary

Wind Power Sector is growing very fast in Europe. As EWEA pointed out, in 1994, there were 1,683 megawatts (MW) of wind energy installed across the EU. By the end of 2005, installed capacity had increased 24 times (more than 40,300 MW). By 2030, 300 GW will be installed in order to achieve European Targets (with the assumption that the average size of a wind turbine will be changed).

The use of wind power is growing strongly in Europe and, to meet sector demands, a well trained workforce is needed. Companies of wind energy sector have realized that there is a great lack of technicians with a solid training and the required abilities to work in wind mills and maintenance tasks that wind farms demand. In this context some professions are emerging and it is necessary to identify the competencies for a good performance and develop the contents and practices to train these technicians.

The general aim of this project is to train to wind mills maintenance technicians. For this purpose it is necessary to gather and organize the current level of knowledge regarding wind mills maintenance in the partners countries and it is proposed to document, select, classify and combine this knowledge, to design, standardize and develop a training programme and to adapt it to an e-learning platform that it will be tested in different training pilot projects. This tool will provide Simulations of Interactive Virtual Reality to train the most critical operations in maintenance of wind farms regarding safety, budget and relevance. So, the main outcome of this project to achieve the main objective of the training is a new multilingual eLearning programme/course enriched with interactive Virtual Reality based exercises and European developed contents to train students (in vocational training centres), technicians and jobless technicians by using new interactive virtual reality based techniques.

Each of the members of the consortium (from 5 EU countries, Spain, Germany, Greece, Portugal and Lithuania) has a specific complementary role that will definitely contribute to achieve the main and the specific goals of the project.