The Horizon Europe research project MERIDIONAL, which has spent four years studying the physics of wind and its effect on onshore, offshore and airborne wind energy systems, is closing with a commercial spin-off. Ventoplani, an Italian start-up founded by researchers at Politecnico di Milano, is bringing small-scale airborne wind energy devices, which it calls windplanes, to homes, businesses and off-grid locations.
The devices are fixed-wing airborne wind energy systems that generate electricity with small turbines mounted on the aircraft. Lightweight and fully autonomous, they are tethered to the ground like kites. Because they fly rather than stand on a tower, they reach the stronger and steadier winds at higher altitude while using less than a tenth of the material of a conventional turbine of comparable output, according to the company: no tower, no foundation and no large blades to manufacture and transport.
Ventoplani positions windplanes as a complement to conventional turbines, for sites and scales where a fixed machine is impractical. Their output over the course of a day pairs with solar generation and reduces the battery storage a hybrid system would otherwise need, the company says. The foldable structure, deployable in some configurations through autonomous flight, is intended to allow rapid set-up in places such as disaster relief operations or other temporary sites. Starting from individual users, the company says it aims to scale the concept up to utility-scale offshore applications.
Within MERIDIONAL, Politecnico di Milano worked on the design and control of airborne wind energy systems and filed two patents on enabling technologies for the windplane concept. Ventoplani was founded by Filippo Trevisi, Lorenzo Fagiano and Leonardo Cecchin, all researchers at the university’s SAS-Lab, and builds on more than a decade of academic work on airborne wind energy.
“Green energy is becoming more and more accessible to everyone, and we are enthusiastic about making new solutions known to the European market,” said Federica Fusco, communication and outreach officer at Fondazione ICONS, a partner in the project.
MERIDIONAL is funded under the EU’s Horizon research and innovation programme with a budget of roughly EUR 6 million and runs from November 2022 to September 2026, coordinated by Prof. Simon J. Watson of TU Delft. Airborne wind energy remains a niche technology, with no utility-scale commercial deployments to date; the spin-off illustrates how EU-funded fundamental research can lead to market applications beyond the lifetime of the project itself.
