scholarly journals Monitoring offshore wind farm power performance with SCADA data and advanced wake model

Author(s):  
Niko Mittelmeier ◽  
Tomas Blodau ◽  
Martin Kühn

Abstract. Wind farm underperformance can lead to significant losses in revenues. Efficient detection of wind turbines operating below their expected power output and immediate corrections help maximise asset value. The presented method estimates the environmental conditions from turbine states and uses pre-calculated power matrices from a numeric wake model to predict the expected power output. Deviations between the expected and the measured power output are an indication of underperformance. The confidence of detected underperformance is estimated by detailed analysis of uncertainties of the method. Power normalisation with reference turbines and averaging several measurement devices can reduce uncertainties for estimating the expected power. A demonstration of the method’s ability to detect underperformance in the form of degradation and curtailment is given. Underperformance of 8 % could be detected in a triple wake condition.

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niko Mittelmeier ◽  
Tomas Blodau ◽  
Martin Kühn

Abstract. Wind farm underperformance can lead to significant losses in revenues. The efficient detection of wind turbines operating below their expected power output and immediate corrections help maximize asset value. The method, presented in this paper, estimates the environmental conditions from turbine states and uses pre-calculated lookup tables from a numeric wake model to predict the expected power output. Deviations between the expected and the measured power output ratio between two turbines are an indication of underperformance. The confidence of detected underperformance is estimated by a detailed analysis of the uncertainties of the method. Power normalization with reference turbines and averaging several measures performed by devices of the same type can reduce uncertainties for estimating the expected power. A demonstration of the method's ability to detect underperformance in the form of degradation and curtailment is given. An underperformance of 8 % could be detected in a triple-wake condition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 997-1014
Author(s):  
Janna Kristina Seifert ◽  
Martin Kraft ◽  
Martin Kühn ◽  
Laura J. Lukassen

Abstract. Space–time correlations of power output fluctuations of wind turbine pairs provide information on the flow conditions within a wind farm and the interactions of wind turbines. Such information can play an essential role in controlling wind turbines and short-term load or power forecasting. However, the challenges of analysing correlations of power output fluctuations in a wind farm are the highly varying flow conditions. Here, we present an approach to investigate space–time correlations of power output fluctuations of streamwise-aligned wind turbine pairs based on high-resolution supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data. The proposed approach overcomes the challenge of spatially variable and temporally variable flow conditions within the wind farm. We analyse the influences of the different statistics of the power output of wind turbines on the correlations of power output fluctuations based on 8 months of measurements from an offshore wind farm with 80 wind turbines. First, we assess the effect of the wind direction on the correlations of power output fluctuations of wind turbine pairs. We show that the correlations are highest for the streamwise-aligned wind turbine pairs and decrease when the mean wind direction changes its angle to be more perpendicular to the pair. Further, we show that the correlations for streamwise-aligned wind turbine pairs depend on the location of the wind turbines within the wind farm and on their inflow conditions (free stream or wake). Our primary result is that the standard deviations of the power output fluctuations and the normalised power difference of the wind turbines in a pair can characterise the correlations of power output fluctuations of streamwise-aligned wind turbine pairs. Further, we show that clustering can be used to identify different correlation curves. For this, we employ the data-driven k-means clustering algorithm to cluster the standard deviations of the power output fluctuations of the wind turbines and the normalised power difference of the wind turbines in a pair. Thereby, wind turbine pairs with similar power output fluctuation correlations are clustered independently from their location. With this, we account for the highly variable flow conditions inside a wind farm, which unpredictably influence the correlations.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Stidworthy ◽  
David Carruthers

Abstract. A new model, FLOWSTAR-Energy, has been developed for the practical calculation of wind farm energy production. It includes a semi-analytic model for airflow over complex surfaces (FLOWSTAR) and a wind turbine wake model that simulates wake-wake interaction by exploiting some similarities between the decay of a wind turbine wake and the dispersion of plume of passive gas emitted from an elevated source. Additional turbulence due to the wind shear at the wake edge is included and the assumption is made that wind turbines are only affected by wakes from upstream wind turbines. The model takes account of the structure of the atmospheric boundary layer, which means that the effect of atmospheric stability is included. A marine boundary layer scheme is also included to enable offshore as well as onshore sites to be modelled. FLOWSTAR-Energy has been used to model three different wind farms and the predicted energy output compared with measured data. Maps of wind speed and turbulence have also been calculated for two of the wind farms. The Tjaæreborg wind farm is an onshore site consisting of a single 2 MW wind turbine, the NoordZee offshore wind farm consists of 36 V90 VESTAS 3 MW turbines and the Nysted offshore wind farm consists of 72 Bonus 2.3 MW turbines. The NoordZee and Nysted measurement datasets include stability distribution data, which was included in the modelling. Of the two offshore wind farm datasets, the Noordzee dataset focuses on a single 5-degree wind direction sector and therefore only represents a limited number of measurements (1,284); whereas the Nysted dataset captures data for seven 5-degree wind direction sectors and represents a larger number of measurements (84,363). The best agreement between modelled and measured data was obtained with the Nysted dataset, with high correlation (0.98 or above) and low normalised mean square error (0.007 or below) for all three flow cases. The results from Tjæreborg show that the model replicates the Gaussian shape of the wake deficit two turbine diameters downstream of the turbine, but the lack of stability information in this dataset makes it difficult to draw conclusions about model performance. One of the key strengths of FLOWSTAR-Energy is its ability to model the effects of complex terrain on the airflow. However, although the airflow model has been previously compared extensively with flow data, it has so far not been used in detail to predict energy yields from wind farms in complex terrain. This will be the subject of a further validation study for FLOWSTAR-Energy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Mohammed Amine Hassoine ◽  
Fouad Lahlou ◽  
Adnane Addaim ◽  
Abdessalam Ait Madi

The objective of this paper is to investigate the ability of analytical wake models to estimate the wake effects between wind turbines (WTs). The interaction of multiple wakes reduces the total power output produced by a large offshore wind farm (LOFWF). This power loss is due to the effect of turbine spacing (WTS), if the WTs are too close, the power loss is very significant. Therefore, the optimization of turbine positions within the offshore wind farm requires an understanding of the interaction of wakes inside the wind farm. To better understand the wake effect, the Horns Rev 1 offshore wind farm has been studied with four wake models, Jensen, Larsen, Ishihara, and Frandsen. A comparative study of the wake models has been performed in several situations and configurations, single and multiple wakes are taken into consideration. Results from the Horns Rev1 offshore wind farm case have  been evaluated and compared to observational data, and also  with the previous studies. The power output of a row of WTs is sensitive to the wind direction. For example, if a row of ten turbines is aligned with the 270° wind direction, the full wake condition of WTs is reached and the power deficit limit predicted by Jensen model exceeds 70%. When a wind direction changes only of  10° (260° and 280°), the deficit limit reduces to 30%. The obtained results show that a significant power deficit occurs when the turbines are arranged in an aligned manner. The findings also showed that all four models gave acceptable predictions of the total power output. The comparison between the calculated and reported power output of Horns Revs 1 showed that the differences ranged from - 8.27 MW (12.49%) to 15.27 MW (23.06%) for the Larsen and Frandsen models, respectively.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Duc ◽  
Olivier Coupiac ◽  
Nicolas Girard ◽  
Gregor Giebel ◽  
Tuhfe Göçmen

Abstract. In this paper, a new calculation procedure to improve the accuracy of the Jensen wake model for operating wind farms is proposed. In this procedure the wake decay constant is updated locally at each wind turbine based on the turbulence intensity measurement provided by the nacelle anemometer. This procedure was tested against experimental data at onshore wind farm La Sole du Moulin Vieux (SMV) in France and the offshore wind farm Horns Rev-I in Denmark. Results indicate that the wake deficit at each wind turbine is described more accurately than when using the original model, reducing the error from 15–20 % to approximately 5 %. Furthermore, this new model properly calibrated for the SMV wind farm is then used for coordinated control purposes. Assuming an axial induction control strategy, and following a model predictive approach, new power settings leading to an increased overall power production of the farm are derived. Power gains found are in the order of 2.5 % for a two wind turbine case with close spacing and 1 to 1.5 % for a row of five wind turbines with a larger spacing. Finally, the uncertainty of the updated Jensen model is quantified considering the model inputs. When checked against the predicted power gain, the uncertainty of the model estimations is seen to be excessive, reaching approximately 4 %, which indicates the difficulty of field observations for such a gain. Nevertheless, the optimized settings are to be implemented during a field test campaign at SMV wind farm in scope of the national project SMARTEOLE.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 601-621
Author(s):  
Michael Denis Mifsud ◽  
Tonio Sant ◽  
Robert Nicholas Farrugia

Abstract. This paper investigates the uncertainties resulting from different measure–correlate–predict (MCP) methods to project the power and energy yield from a wind farm. The analysis is based on a case study that utilises short-term data acquired from a lidar wind measurement system deployed at a coastal site in the northern part of the island of Malta and long-term measurements from the island's international airport. The wind speed at the candidate site is measured by means of a lidar system. The predicted power output for a hypothetical offshore wind farm from the various MCP methodologies is compared to the actual power output obtained directly from the input of lidar data to establish which MCP methodology best predicts the power generated. The power output from the wind farm is predicted by inputting wind speed and direction derived from the different MCP methods into windPRO® (https://www.emd.dk/windpro, last access: 8 May 2020). The predicted power is compared to the power output generated from the actual wind and direction data by using the normalised mean absolute error (NMAE) and the normalised mean-squared error (NMSE). This methodology will establish which combination of MCP methodology and wind farm configuration will have the least prediction error. The best MCP methodology which combines prediction of wind speed and wind direction, together with the topology of the wind farm, is that using multiple linear regression (MLR). However, the study concludes that the other MCP methodologies cannot be discarded as it is always best to compare different combinations of MCP methodologies for wind speed and wind direction, together with different wake models and wind farm topologies.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Denis Mifsud ◽  
Tonio Sant ◽  
Robert Nicholas Farrugia

Abstract. This paper investigates the uncertainties resulting from different Measure-Correlate-Predict methods to project the power and energy yield from a wind farm. The analysis is based on a case study that utilizes short-term data acquired from a LiDAR wind measurement system deployed at a coastal site in the northern part of the island of Malta and long-term measurements from the island’s international airport. The wind speed at the candidate site is measured by means of a LiDAR system. The predicted power output for a hypothetical offshore wind farm from the various MCP methodologies is compared to the actual power output obtained directly from the input of LiDAR data to establish which MCP methodology best predicts the power generated. The power output from the wind farm is predicted by inputting wind speed and direction derived from the different MCP methods into windPRO® (https://www.emd.dk/windpro). The predicted power is compared to the power output generated from the actual wind and direction data by using the Mean Squared Error (MSE) and the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) measures. This methodology will establish which combination of MCP methodology and wind farm configuration will have the least prediction error. The best MCP methodology which combines prediction of wind speed and wind direction, together with the topology of the wind farm, is that using Artificial Neural Networks. However, the study concludes that the other MCP methodologies cannot be discarded as it is always best to compare different combinations of MCP methodologies for wind speed and wind direction, together with different wake models and wind farm topologies.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (20) ◽  
pp. 6670
Author(s):  
Yu-Hsiang Hung ◽  
Yi-Wei Chen ◽  
Cheng-Han Chuang ◽  
Yuan-Yih Hsu

A de-loaded real power control strategy is proposed to decrease the real power output and increase the reactive power output of a grid-connected offshore wind farm in order to improve the voltage profile when the wind farm is subject to a grid fault. A simplified linear model of the wind farm is first derived and a fixed-gain proportional-integral (PI) real power controller is designed based on the pole-zero cancellation method. To improve the dynamic voltage response when the system is subject to a major disturbance such as a three-phase fault in the grid, a self-tuning controller based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is proposed to adapt the PI controller gains based on the on-line measured system variables. Digital simulations using MATLAB/SIMULINK were performed on an offshore wind farm connected to the power grid in central Taiwan in order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed PSO controller. It is concluded from the simulation results that a better dynamic voltage response can be achieved by the proposed PSO self-tuning controller than the fixed-gain controller when the grid is subject to a three-phase fault. In addition, low voltage ride through (LVRT) requirements of the local utility can be met by the wind farm with the proposed power controller.


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