Stemming from years of research in the context of the MERIDIONAL EU-project, the startup Ventoplani is bringing airborne wind energy to people's homes.

After four years of investigating the physics of wind and its effect on onshore, offshore, and airborne wind energy systems, the Horizon Europe project MERIDIONAL is coming to an end with an unexpected twist and a new market application: the Italian startup Ventoplani.

Founded by Politecnico di Milano, Ventoplani is the result of the MERIDIONAL project’s ambition to improve our understanding of the physics of the atmosphere and its impact on wind energy systems. Thanks to modelling and tests conducted from 2022 to 2026, airborne wind energy research has evolved into small-scale windplanes for homes, businesses and off-grid locations where conventional energy systems are costly or impractical, with a clear path toward utility-scale applications.

"Green energy is becoming more and more accessible to everyone, and we’re enthusiastic about making new solutions known to the European market” states Federica Fusco, communication and outreach officer at ICONS foundation, partner in the project. “Ventoplani is pioneering wind energy self-production. The European market needs to know and boost this innovative startup”.

Much as distributed solar has decentralised and democratised electricity generation, windplanes are designed to bring wind power to the people. Starting from individual use, Ventoplani aims to scale windplanes up to utility-scale offshore applications.


Windplanes: how the technology works
The devices developed by Ventoplani are fixed-wing airborne wind energy systems that harvest wind power using small onboard turbines. Lightweight and fully autonomous, they are tethered to the ground, like kites.

Windplanes are designed to complement conventional wind turbines, not replace them, by reaching sites and scales where a fixed turbine is less practical. Because they fly rather than stand on a tower, they access the stronger, more consistent winds available at higher altitudes using less than 10% of the material of a conventional turbine of comparable output. No tower, no foundation, no blades to manufacture and transport are needed for windplanes. This makes them viable at a scale and allow powering a single home, business or off-grid community. Windplanes’ power output over the course of the day pairs efficiently with solar generation and reduces the battery storage otherwise needed to keep a hybrid system running. Their lighter, foldable structure – deployable, in some configurations, through autonomous flight – also allows windplanes to be set up quickly in locations conventional turbines cannot easily reach, such as disaster relief operations or other temporary sites.


The team behind the startup
Within the MERIDIONAL team, the Politecnico di Milano has focused specifically on the design and control of airborne wind energy systems, filing two patents on key enabling technologies for the windplane concept.

Ventoplani is turning more than a decade of academic research on airborne wind energy into a market-ready product. Founded by Filippo Trevisi, Prof. Lorenzo Fagiano and Leonardo Cecchin – all researchers at the PoloMi SAS-Lab – the university spin-off is a concrete example of how sustained public investment in fundamental research can translate into new technology and new enterprise. The research base was built through of EU and national research funds – including the Horizon Europe project MERIDIONAL – and through international scientific cooperation across European universities. Ventoplani's path from lab to market illustrates how funding EU research into clean-energy technologies generates value that extends well beyond the lifetime of the project itself.