ETN’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) and Workshop was held on 17-18 April 2012 in Berlin, Germany. In his capacity as president of the board, Bernard Quoix of TOTAL welcomed the participants to the ETN Annual General Meeting. In his speech he welcomed the many new members who joined ETN in 2011-2012 which shows that ETN with its 92 members has become an important player for the whole gas turbine community and towards European Union institutions.

Mr Quoix highlighted the many projects and initiatives which have been started or progressed this year, leading to a new internal structure to ensure that ETN has processes, resources and tools available to encompass this growth. He also looked ahead to the future, to the new ETN Educational Programme and the 6th International Gas Turbine Conference – The Future of Gas Turbine Technology which will take place on 17-18 October 2012 in Brussels. Finally, he highlighted the main goals for the upcoming period, which are reinforcing the participation of the Users, because it all starts from the technical challenges faced by the Users; reinforcing the so-called “vertical growth” by having more people involved within each member organisation; and encouraging emergence of initiatives, and subjects that are of interest to the whole community; and finally having more success stories for example of the H₂-IGCC project.

In the morning of 17 April, members had the opportunity to visit Vattenfall’s CHP Berlin Mitte plant, the Industrial-Gas-Turbine overhaul facilities at MTU or TU Berlin’s Combustion Facilities. In the afternoon, the AGM gave a general update on ETN activities for the past year as well as an insight into our plans for the coming years. A presentation was delivered with information on the Board’s new ETN internal structure, and the new and improved ETN website was launched as well as demonstrated. The General Assembly elected the new ETN Board for 2012/13. An EU energy policy update was presented followed by a discussion on future R&D opportunities, including users’ perspective on future GT developments, as well as OEMs’ perspective on key areas of Horizon 2020, the new research funding programme of the EU. New and ongoing projects reported their progress, for instance on exhaust systems, filtration technology, advanced sensors, combustion instabilities hot borescoping, creep-fatigue and virtual testing.

On 18 April, our Workshop commenced with an introduction to the new ETN Project Board and Development Process. The latest developments on the EU’s Industrial Emissions Directive (IED) were presented, and new proposed ETN R&D initiatives were discussed. In the afternoon members had the opportunity to attend committee sessions on cycle efficiency, fuel flexibility and emissions, materials degradation and repair technologies, condition monitoring, instrumentation and control, and asset management.

You can download ETN President Bernard Quoix’s full speech here.