Reconstruction of environmental site conditions by the integration of SCADA and reanalysis data

Abstract

For the operational optimization of wind farms, AEP estimation and other tasks, high quality data of environmental conditions at the site are necessary. However, such data is often not available or has insufficient quality. This work tries to fill this gap, by integrating two data sources: the (usually available) operational data from the SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system, and reanalysis data. SCADA data streams contain measurements from each wind turbine in the farm, but they are affected by various sources of uncertainty (including local flow effects, miscalibration, etc.), and might contain gaps. Meteorological reanalysis datasets can be used to fill gaps and complement SCADA data. However, modelled data can contain a wide range of biases and errors, due to limited model fidelity, coarse spatial and temporal resolution, inaccuracies in the input data feeding the model, etc. This study considers various methods to extract and merge wind speed and direction information from these diverse data sources. The analysis is based on field data measured at two experimental test sites, an offshore site equipped with 111 multi-MW turbines and a lidar buoy, and an onshore site equipped with 14 multi-MW wind turbines and a lidar. The methods are evaluated in the spectral and temporal domains by comparing the reconstructed wind characteristics with measurements from the lidars.