Understanding culture and digitalisation in wind energy

13 June 2024
Posted in News, Task 43
13 June 2024 Sarah Barber

Culture - The second Grand Challenge in the digitalisation of wind energy

In a recent paper coordinated by IEA Wind Task 43, the “Grand challenges in the digitalisation of wind energy” were found to be:

  1. Data: creating Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) data frameworks.
  2. Culture: connecting people and data to foster innovation.
  3. Coopetition: enabling collaboration and competition between organisations.

In IEA Wind Task 43, we aim to understand these three challenges, and then to develop tools and recommendations for the sector to overcome them. For the “Culture” challenge, our first step is to run the IEA Wind Task 43 Culture Questionnaire.

The IEA Wind Task 43 Culture Questionnaire

In the IEA Wind Task 43 Culture Questionnaire, we aim to understand organisational culture and digitalisation in the wind energy sector. We understand “culture” to mean an organisation’s beliefs, values and attitudes, and how these influence the behaviour of its employees.

Initial results

The initial results, provided by 33 people from academia and industry, show that most organisations foster digitalisation either very poorly or fairly poorly (image below, left), whereas the majority of teams foster digitalisation either well or very well (image below, right).

The image below shows a summary of how well various aspects of culture related to digitalisation are implemented in organisations (blue) and team (orange). It’s interesting that many aspects are better implemented by teams than by organisations, with the exception of the availability of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training, leadership training and communication training.

Further analysis is underway, but we need more responses!

Get involved

Anyone working in the wind energy sector with any background or level of experience can participate, and it only takes five minutes of your time.

The results will be used anonymously in order to develop recommendations for fostering digitalisation in wind energy through culture. Your answers will help us understand the topic of culture and how it relates to digitalisation, and may also be used anonymously towards a review paper. If you share your email address, it will only be used by us to contact you in case any clarifications or further questions regarding the questionnaire are necessary.

More about IEA Wind Task 43

In IEA Wind Task 43, our vision is to unlock the full value of wind energy through digital transformation. Our mission is to act as a digital transformation catalyst by driving open collaboration within and beyond the wind community to deliver insights, recommendations, standards and tools in the key areas of data, culture, and coopetition. Our activities are based on the three “Grand Challenges in the Digitalisation of Wind Energy”, Data, Culture and Coopetition.

As well as a Working Group for task management (WG0),  we organise IEA Wind Task 43 around three Working Groups for the three Grand Challenges of Digitalisation in Wind Energy (WG1, WG2, WG3) as well as a fourth one for use-case demonstrations (WG4). In each WG, we focus on (1) gaining knowledge and understanding, then (2) creating recommendations, both for the sector as a whole and also for the rest of the IEA Wind Task 43 participants, and then (3) developing and testing usable tools in a safe environment based on the recommendations. We regularly review and adapt our activities according to inputs from the industry as well as our learning experience.

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