Equivalent power curve model of a wind farm based on field measurement data

Abstract

This paper discusses how a simple equivalent model of a whole wind farm can be obtained using field measurement data for individual wind turbines at the site. The equivalent model, which is formulated as a power curve, is specifically intended for steady state performance assessment, i.e. estimation of annual energy production of the wind farm. Two general approaches for building the equivalent steady state model of the wind farm are analysed: a) aggregate-measured power curve, obtained as an averaged aggregate representation of the outputs from all wind turbines, and b) cluster-measured power curve, obtained using the support vector clustering technique. Recorded measurement data from two actual wind farms are used to perform the analysis and to validate the results, where the accuracy of both proposed methods is assessed by direct comparison with the available recordings.