PLOCAN hosted the final meeting of the research project into Multinational Preparedness and Response to Hydrocarbon and Chemical Spills (MARPOCS) in the Atlantic sub-region encompassing Morocco, Madeira and the Canary Islands.
Juan María Vázquez, secretary general for Science and Innovation, chaired the ceremony to sign a co-operation agreement signed by the director of the Canary Island Oceanic Platform, Octavio Llinás, and Rafael Robaina, chancellor of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The signing ceremony was also attended by the director of the Canary Island Research, Innovation and Information Society Agency, Manuel Miranda Medina, and the deputy chancellors of Research, Innovation and Transfer, José Pablo Suárez Rivero, and Academic Organisation and Teaching Staff, Luis Domínguez Boada.
he European Logistic Efficiency and Naval Architecture for Wind Facilities with New Developments project (LEANWIND), funded by the 8th European Union framework programme to reduce the costs of deep-water off-shore wind farms and make them more competitive against fossil fuel-generated power came to an end in November 2017.
Launched in December 2013, the main objective of LEANWIND was to apply “lean” principles, developed by the car industry in Japan, to enhance efficiency and reduce costs in all stages of the life cycle of off-shore marine wind farm projects and their supply chain, and to develop cutting-edge tools and technology.
31 partners from Ireland, Norway, Spain, Denmark, France, United Kingdom, Portugal, Greece, Belgium, Germany and Turkey took part in a project that cost approximately €15m, and which received European funding to the tune of some €10m. The partners represent the geographic areas with the greatest marine wind-energy activity in Europe, multinational companies, SMEs and even universities and research centres.
The “Empleo Joven” (Young Employment) programme run with grants from the European Social Fund, envisaged in the Youth Employment Programme, and aimed at sustainably integrating young people in the job market, in the context of the National Youth Guarantee System, enabled PLOCAN to hire a higher vocational training diploma graduate and a university graduate between December 2015 and November 2017..
The young people were taken on to work on two specific actions. Cristina Almisas González, the university graduate, worked on the “Operation and maintenance of marine gliders”. Her main activities were to cover the technical and operational needs entailed in the use and maintenance of this specific kind of latest-generation, un-manned marine observation devices, used mainly to measure multiple environmental parameters in coastal waters and on the high seas, both on the surface of the ocean and at increasing depths.
The higher vocational training diploma graduate, Vicente Martínez López, worked on “Validation and maintenance of meteorological-oceanographic sensors”, which consisted of validating, maintaining and servicing the meteorological-oceanographic sensors used on buoys and other observation devices, as well as other maintenance tasks in the area of Information and Communication Technologies.