Task 43 – hot topics, ethics and cool swimming at the AGM 2026

In IEA Wind Task 43, our vision is to unlock the full value of wind energy through digitalisation. Our mission is to act as a digitalisation 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“, GC1 Data, GC2 Culture and GC3 Coopetition.

Digitalisation is one of the key mega-trends of wind energy technology, and can unlock massive savings in the sector due to increased data and code handling efficiency, improved performance of analytics and planning tools, more effective decision-making, and improved performance of digital teams.

At the IEA Wind Task 43 AGM 2026 / WeDoWind International Symposium 2026 at the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (OST) in Rapperswil on June 24th-26th 2026, the 80 in-person and online participants enjoyed a variety of inspiring presentations, task activity updates, interactive group workshops, challenge-solving activities, sauna-like coffee breaks and cool swimming in the lake!

Day 1: Finishing off Task 43 and transitioning to Task 66

On Day 1, we started with a key-note speech on “Framework for managing risk in industrial AI systems” by Lars Meløe from DNV in Norway. In particular, the DNV Recommended Practice DNV-RP-0671 “Assurance of AI-enabled systems” he presented may be useful for the Task’s future activities on AI-readiness and value demonstration. Access the recording of the key-note speech here:

 

This was followed by a panel discussion on “Ethics of Digitalisation and AI” moderated by Sarah Barber and featuring voices from across academia and industry: Lars Meløe (DNV), Jen Wilson (Durham University), James Merron Zimmermann (University of Basel), John Draper (E&P Consulting), and Lorenzo Fiaschi and Ilia Shilov (both ETH Zurich). We concluded that ethics is a complex topic, and we should considering a framework to help us deal with small, every-day decisions that are made within the IEA Wind Task 43 working groups.

After a morning coffee break, the Task turned inward, with short Working Group reports. A summary of our recent work can be found in this recent IEA Wind Task 43 Annual Report [LINK]. The presentations were useful to make Working Group participants aware of the activities going on in other Working Groups. After the lunch break, we heard presentations from new Working Group leaders about the New Task, which will start on November 1st, 2026, and be called “IEA Wind Task 66 – Digitalisation”. Task 66 will continue many Task 43 activities, but will be further developed as follows:

• Shift from framework creation to value demonstration at scale
• Explicit integration of generative AI, robotics, and immersive technologies
• Stronger emphasis on ethics, workforce, and human in the loop

The figure below shows the four new themes of IEA Wind Task 66:

• Theme 1: FAIRness — Improves the FAIRness of wind energy data and code through community learning, practitioner recommendations, supporting tools like information models, and use cases that demonstrate their value.
• Theme 2: Readiness for intelligent systems and automation — Prepares wind energy data and code for AI, digital twins, and robotics through community learning, recommendations, tools, and demonstrated use cases.
• Theme 3: Organisational culture and human factors — Strengthens organisational culture and addresses human factors like ethics, community building, and the digital workforce gap through learning, recommendations, tools, and use cases.
• Theme 4: Overarching use cases — Tackles real industry problems outside the other three themes to prevent siloing, surface cross-cutting learnings, and illustrate the broader value of data-driven decision-making.

The afternoon got hands-on with an exploratory workshop led by Jen Wilson (Durham University) on “Deciding what matters in digitalisation: an exploratory workshop on ethical practice”. After discussing what ethical practice means, we split into groups and discussed how ethics comes into decisions that need to be made for three different relevant scenarios. The workshop sparked new awareness about the way we run Task 43 as well as how we work in our own organisations. The outcomes will be used as a basis for the new Working Group in Theme 3 of Task 66 on “Community building and collaborative knowledge ecosystems”.

The day wrapped with a “synergies and collaborations” workshop, and a “future outlook” session, in which we defined concrete next steps for exploiting the synergies and challenges that came up during the previous activities. The Organising Committee is now in the process of following up on these ideas!

We then cooled down in the nearby lake with beautiful mountain views, and had dinner together, so that we were refreshed and cooled down ready for Day 2!

Day 2: Collaboration, coopetition and WeDoWind

Day 2 focused on WeDoWind, a non-profit organisation running an open innovation platform, with whom Task 43 collaborates with for promoting so-called “coopetition” in wind energy. “Coopetition” is a combination of “competition” and “cooperation”, and is an effective tool for promoting innovation in sectors such as wind energy, by encouraging sharing, comparison and competition across different organisations.

We started off with an inspiring key-note speech on “From Wind Industry Challenges to R&D Opportunities: Nadara’s Innovation Journey.” by  Catarina Maltez, Innovation and Incentive Specialist at Nadara. It was great to hear about Nadara’s main challenges ((1) Ageing infrastructure, (2) Hidden performance losses, (3) Fragmented data ecosystem, (4) Increasing operational pressure) as well as about the unified platform and standardised data model they are building! Access the recording here:

 

The morning continued with WeDoWind’s Annual General Meeting, giving an update on the non-profit’s status, followed by short reports, Q&A, and a user survey and feedback session — a chance for the community to shape where WeDoWind goes next.

In the afternoon, we ran two challenge-solving workshops connected to WeDoWind’s two currently-running challenges:

• The Nadara Yaw Misalignment Challenge, run by Tania Guedes (Performance Analysis and Optimisation Manager, Nadara) — tackling a real, costly operational issue in wind turbine performance.
• The R2H2 Control of Wind-to-Hydrogen Co-opetition, run by Adam Stock (Heriot-Watt University) — exploring control strategies at the intersection of wind power and hydrogen production.

After presentations from each challenges provider, we split into groups and worked collaboratively on:

1. Understanding the problem and preparing the tools 
2. Collecting ideas for solution approach types
3. Initial data exploration using the provided browser-based tools
4. Adapting ideas and adding new ones based on the data exploration
5. Comparing and evaluating different options
6. Choosing the best option and creating the flow-chart describing how the solution works
7. Documenting any open questions or additional information or tools required

The groups made significant progress understanding the problem, examining the data and suggesting concrete ideas for solution methodologies!

After final presentations of the results, we rewarded our hard work with another dip in the lake and dinner together.

Day 3: Focused work on the Operations Ontology

On Day 3, the Operations Ontology working group got together to focus on the further development of the Operations Ontology. This working group is a diverse range of experts across multiple disciplines working to create a clear and consistent ontological framework for describing operations and operational data, to enable the full potential value of such data to be realised. This framework will support navigation across different levels of granularity and different perspectives, so that it can cater to all relevant use cases.

Conclusions

This event involved a variety of different types of activities that informed and involved all the in-person and hybrid participants. It allowed us to define some concrete next steps for the transition from Task 43 to Task 66. We learned about existing ethics frameworks for our work, we gained new ideas for how to focus our Working Groups on value demonstration, we defined several next steps for collaborating more effectively between working groups, we made progress on solving two WeDoWind challenges, we significantly brought on the Operations Ontology, and we gained some new members!

Find out more

You can read more about IEA Wind Task 43 and join us here. If you are not based in one of the participating countries, you can join as an observer. Or contact the Co-Operating Agent Sarah Barber at sarah.barber@ost.ch. Starting on November 1st, 2026, we will be called IEA Wind Task 66 on Digalisation.