Abstract
The suitability of turbine configurations to different wind resources has been traditionally restricted to considering turbines operating as standalone entities. In this paper, a framework is thus developed to investigate turbine suitability in terms of the minimum cost of energy offered when operating as a group of optimally-micro-sited turbines. The four major steps include: (i) characterizing the geographical variation of wind regimes in the onshore U.S. market; (ii) determining the best performing turbines for different wind regimes through wind farm layout optimization; (iii) developing a metric to quantify the expected market suitability of available turbine configurations; and (iv) exploring the best tradeoffs between the cost and capacity factor yielded by these turbines. One hundred thirty one types of commercial turbines offered by major global manufacturers in 2012 are considered for selection. It is found that, in general, higher rated power turbines with medium tower heights are the most favored. Interestingly, further analysis showed that “rotor diameter/hub height” ratios greater than 1.1 are the least attractive for any of the wind classes. It is also observed 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.
Highlights
To accomplish this challenging task, this paper develops a comprehensive framework that comprises the following four steps: Step 1 The geographical variation/distribution of wind regimes in the target market is characterized; the U.S onshore market is used as the case study
It is important to note that the explorations performed in this paper are subject to the approximations and assumptions generally made in the creation of wind maps; and when dedicated wind data become available at the region-wide scale, they should serve as the preferred source of wind resource information in such explorations
The wind turbine design cost and scaling (WTDCS) cost model used in this study considers and is applicable for those turbine configurations that have been popular in the commercial industry, which includes the three-bladed, upwind, pitch-controlled, variable-speed wind turbine and its variants
Summary
The intermittency of a wind resource at a location and the variation of the wind pattern from one location to another present significant challenges to advancing the penetration of wind energy. To promote better decision making both at the level of the turbine manufacturers and the farm developers in different geographical regions, the following explorations are needed: (i) explorative studies that provide a global understanding of the suitability of different turbine feature combinations (e.g., dimensions and power characteristics) for different wind regimes; and (ii) an analysis of the economic and production potential offered by the most suitable turbine configurations (among those commercially available) In this context, it is important to realize that such explorations need to consider wind turbine performance and the associated cost of energy in the context of their operation as a group of optimally-micro-sited turbines. The following three Subsections, 1.2–1.4, respectively discuss the role of turbine selection in wind farm planning, the observed variation of wind patterns in a national market, and the major components of the exploration framework developed in this paper
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