In the last release of Shorts episodes I shared my time working for the Danish offshore renewable sector in Brussels. One of the key players I was supporting was Technical University of Denmark. And what an organisation to support!

This is a research organisation that from around 1980 started to give input to the European Commission on wind energy. When the framework programmes started in the early 1980’s they tapped early into them because the resources that were allocated to them from the Danish government was fairly limited. That formed the basis of the institute’s Brussels approach: 1) building capacities and experience in working with the Brussels eco-system to get their voice heard, 2) developing a more and more professional organisation around their proposal preparation and 3) running EU-projects making it possible for DTU Wind to constantly add more and more resources to their research. All this helped the institute becoming a world-leading research organisation on wind energy. Absolutely brilliant.

I managed to lure one of the European godfathers of wind energy, Chief Consultant and former Deputy Head of Wind Energy Department, Peter Hjuler Jensen, into the virtual podcast studio. We had a great talk about how they managed to build all this up in the early days and then he shares how the research institute professionally work now with the EU R&D funding.

Lots of inspiration for any research organisation on how to organize and approach the EU funding area.

Time codes:

00:02:27 Introduction

00:06:06 Fly in on DTU Wind and Energy Systems

00:14:31 A little bit of history

00:36:17 Two sides of the sword - how did you do it?

00:56:06 Influencing and lobbying

01:15:39 Synergies

01:27:24 Do's and don't's

01:30:06 The toughest challenge