The preparatory phase ended in September 2015 and an ERIC consortium is seen as the ultimate legal form for the future research infrastructure. This is, however, not realistic in the next couple of years due to lacking national commitment. In the interim phase, however, the WindScanner Consortium partners have agreed on a framework for collaboration of the scientific and industrial communities based on the existing EERA Joint Programme (JP) on Wind Energy, where all present partners of WindScanner.eu are already members. The reason for utilizing the EERA framework is the fact that it has a familiar and proven effective governance structure. The interim phase can be divided into two distinct parts – voluntary collaboration in the framework of EERA and Implementation Phase focusing on the final steps towards the establishment of an ERIC.
In the interim phase a very important element will be to support the establishment of the national nodes by implementing a training and education programme for technicians and scientists, who should operate their national WindScanner. The idea is that when a partner gets funding for purchasing scanners they can obtain the necessary education scheme from the hub to be able to build and operate the scanners themselves. At the start of the interim phase DTU will be responsible for this.