NEWA Steering Committee meeting

General status

Hanne Thomassen from the Danish Energy Agency has replaced Eric Björklund as the coordinator for the network of funding agencies.
The NEWA consortium agreement has been signed by all partners. A signed version of the CA has now been distributed among all partners.

National status (5 minutes per country)

Following information were given concerning contractual matters:
Due to currency issues, budgets have slightly changed for Flanders, Germany and Turkey. These countries will send their updated budgets to the coordinator.
Only Latvia has still not got their funding, but expects to have it very soon.
It was agreed that Germany may invite their funding agency to the NEWA meetings as part of their reporting obligations.

Status of “The intended use of the EU contribution for the common good of the NEWA-consortium”

3 WindScanners have been purchased. Germany has bought two and Denmark has bought one WindScanner from Leosphere. Sweden is currently transferring money to DTU for the purchase as already agreed.
The communication with ESA has until now been a bit vague and will be intensified henceforward.
377.799 EUR of the common good budget has still not been allocated.
It was discussed how to use this amount. The Steering Committee agreed to spend parts of this budget (approx. 120.000 EUR) on buying small masts for the Perdigao experiments. This purchase is conditioned on US funding from NSF.

Following options were also suggested at the meeting:

• Equipment for temperature profiles for having necessary input for modelling. Indicative budget: 5.000-10.000 EUR per set.
• Towers for the Portuguese experiment. Indicative budget: 120.000 EUR
• Access to data - scanning in Germany: Price 100 EUR per km2. Bernhard will investigate the further needs and conditions.
• Potentially field trips
  
  

Decision: The coordinator will at the first steering committee meeting in 2016 present a proposal for
decision on how to spend the rest of the budget for this item of expenditure.

Discussion on critical issues and risk contingency

Communication within the project

An outcome of the meeting was that we shall start using slack (see https://slack.com) for discussions
that involve many persons.
E-mail communication will still be used in parallel. DTU will provide e-mail lists for the project, the
work packages and the steering committee.


What if American funding fails for the Perdigaõ experiment?

Will get their final answers around Christmas.
Decision: The Steering Committee await the outcome of the answer before making any decisions.


What if part 2 of the Spanish funding fails?

Hypothetical.


How to deal with Associated Partners (external contributors)?

We need a model for collaborating with external partners including expected outcome and
requirements. The group of work package leaders will come up with a suggestion for a model on how
to include associated partners and present it for the Steering Committee at the first meeting in 2016.

AoB and next steps

Procedure for reporting deliverables to the European Commission

Reporting of deliverables shall be done by end February every year.
Reporting period is 1.3.2015 to 28.2.2016, the report has to be delivered in May 2016 latest.
An interim report shall soon be finalized. Jakob is in charge of this.

Jakob also informed the Steering Committee that the Danish Energy Agency (DEA) will receive all EU
funding from the European Commission. DEA will subsequently distribute the EU funding to the
respective funding agencies.


Decision on venue and date for the next NEWA Steering Committee meeting

It was decided to have the next general NEWA project workshop and SC meeting in Portugal.
May 10-13, 2016 we will meet in Perdigão (Portugal, two hours from the airport in Lisbon) for

• General workshop of the NEWA project
• Planning of the Perdigão 2017 experiment
  
  

The three first days (May 10-12) will be the general meeting, while the last day (Friday May 13th) will
focus on the detailed planning of the Perdigão 2017 campaign. There will be an excursion to the
Perdigao site in the late afternoon of May 10th. A more detailed agenda, which will also depend on
your input, will appear in due time.