Understanding Wind Turbine Interactions Using Spatiotemporal Pattern Network

Abstract

This paper presents a data-driven modeling framework to understand spatiotemporal interactions among wind turbines in a large scale wind energy farm. A recently developed probabilistic graphical modeling scheme, namely the spatiotemporal pattern network (STPN) is used to capture individual turbine characteristics as well as pair-wise causal dependencies. The causal dependency is quantified by a mutual information based metric and it has been shown that it efficiently and correctly captures both temporal and spatial characteristics of wind turbines. The causal interaction models are also used for predicting wind power production by one wind turbine using observations from another turbine. The proposed tools are validated using the Western Wind Integration data set from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).