LiDAR Measurements to Investigate Farm-to-Farm Interactions at the AWAKEN Experiment

Abstract

The exponential growth of wind energy and the need to exploit wind resources over areas with higher energy potential have led to the construction of neighboring wind turbines and farms with relatively small separation distances. As a result, for specific wind and atmospheric conditions, the wakes generated by an upstream wind farm may affect wind resources available for a downstream wind farm resulting in detrimental impacts on energy harvesting and structural loads for the downwind wind turbines. Distances between neighboring wind farms are typically larger than those associated with intra-wind-farm wake interactions, generating cumulative wakes whose characteristics might differ from those predicted through classical engineering wake models. These phenomena are referred to as farm-to-farm interactions. A better understanding and characterization of farm-to-farm interactions is one of the science goals tackled by the ongoing American WAKE experimeNt (AWAKEN). The site under investigation for this field campaign comprises two large wind farms in northern Oklahoma, USA, which are spaced roughly 5km apart along the prevailing South-North wind direction. To investigate possible interactions between these two wind farms, the WindFluX mobile LiDAR station has been deployed mainly to perform volumetric scans over their gap region. In this paper, preliminary results from these LiDAR volumetric scans will be discussed, specifically for a case with multiple wind turbine wakes evolving during the occurrence of a low-level jet.