Exploring the 'Cost - Capacity Factor' Tradeoffs Offered by the Best Performing Commercial Wind Turbines

Abstract

Wind resources vary significantly in strength from one location to another over a wide geographical region. The major turbine manufacturers offer a family/series of wind turbines to suit the market needs of different wind regimes. The current state of the art in wind farm design however does not provide quantitative guidelines regarding what turbine feature combinations are suitable for different wind regimes, when turbines are operating as a group in an optimized layout. This paper provides a unique exploration of the best tradeoffs between the cost and the capacity factor of wind farms (of specified nameplate capacity), provided by the currently available turbines for different wind classes. To this end, the best performing turbines for different wind resource strengths are identified by minimizing the cost of energy through wind farm layout optimization. Exploration of the “cost - capacity factor” tradeoffs are then performed for the wind resource strengths corresponding to the wind classes defined in the 7-class system. The best tradeoff turbines are determined by searching for the non-dominated set of turbines out of the pool of best performing turbines of different rated powers. The medium priced turbines are observed to provide the most attractive tradeoffs 15% more capacity factor than the cheapest tradeoff turbines and only 5% less capacity factor than the most expensive tradeoff turbines. It was found that although the “cost - capacity factor” tradeoff curve expectedly shifted towards higher capacity factors with increasing wind class, the trend of the tradeoff curve remained practically similar. Further analysis showed that the “rated power - rotor diameter” combination and the “rotor diameter/hub height” ratios are very important considerations in the current selection and further evolution of turbine designs. We found that larger rotor diameters are not preferred for mid-range turbines with rated powers between 1.5 - 2.5 MW, and “rotor diameter/hub height” ratios greater than 1.1 are not preferred by any of the wind classes.