The core project team consists of five members; each with their distinctive and important role for the implementation of the skills, capacity and research development objectives of the twinning agreement.

SANEDI

SANEDI is a state-funded energy research company, reporting to the Departments of Minerals and Energy as well as Science and Technology. It has been established as a wholly-owned subsidiary of CEF (Pty) Ltd.  SANEDI’s focus is on public interest energy R&D and seeks to assist national government in meeting the national goals of 1) economic development (and by implication national competitiveness) and 2) improvement of quality of life of all citizens. SANEDI is primarily concerned with the development and funding of applied technology-based research but limited funds are available for more fundamental, basic research. An additional focus is on human capital development and the transformation of the composition of energy researchers to more adequately represent the demographic profile of the country, in terms of gender and race.

UCT (CSAG)

The Climate Systems Analysis Group (CSAG) is a dynamic group of multi-disciplinary scientists with research projects linked to all aspects of the climate system. CSAG is hosted in the Environmental and Geographical Science department at the University of Cape Town. CSAG is currently funded for a number of research projects which cover a range of activities, but generally fall into three primary areas; Global Climate Model (GCM) applications, Global Climate Change, and South African climate processes

CSIR 

The CSIR is one of the leading scientific and technology research, development and implementation organisations in Africa. Constituted by an Act of Parliament in 1945 as a science council, the CSIR undertakes directed and multidisciplinary research, technological innovation as well as industrial and scientific development to improve the quality of life of the country’s people.  The CSIR Built Environment's Coastal Engineering and Port Infrastructure research group, originally established in 1971, provides predictive engineering solutions and decision support for the safe and cost-effective development and operation of ports and coastal sites which include state-of-the-art equipment to collect data (real time as well as stand-alone) on a number of environmental parameters, including wind energy.  The CSIR’s shareholder is the South African Parliament, held in proxy by the Minister of Science and Technology.

SAWS

The South African Weather Service (SAWS) is the national weather service of South Africa. Presently SAWS is busy with a reassessment of extreme winds for South Africa, and therefore can play an active role in the application part of this project. The outputs of the mesoscale modelling part of this project can serve as a critical input in the determination of the extreme wind climate of South Africa, through the application of the WAsP Engineering software, developed by DTU Wind Energy.

Apart from the above project, SAWS is the custodian of most climate data in South Africa. Specifically, with the high resolution spatial and temporal observational data, SAWS can play an active part in the validation of mesoscale modelling results with measured data. This part of the study will also rely on the weather and climate knowledge of all WASAPT members, including SAWS.

DTU Wind Energy

DTU Wind Energy has been active for decades in wind energy assessment area, and has developed the WAsP software, a microscale modelling tool for wind farm energy calculations, and the KAMM/WAsP method, for the calculation of wind resources over large areas.  The KAMM/WAsP system output is compatible with WAsP, which allows mesoscale results to be applied all the way down to the microscale for wind farm energy calculations.  DTU Wind Energy is now beginning to use the WRF mesoscale model in wind energy studies, and this model is seen as a likely successor to the KAMM mesoscale model.

DTU Wind Energy has worked with meteorological sensors and measurements for almost half a century. DTU Wind Energy has designed, developed and manufactured several meteorological sensors and data acquisition systems; noticeably the DTU Wind Energy; cup anemometer, which today is considered one of a few industry-standard cup anemometers for wind resource assessment and wind turbine power performance testing and verification. Because of its long history within wind power activities, DTU Wind Energy is well acquainted with the special requirements for accurate and reliable wind measurements posed by the wind industry.