Wind plant controls

Abstract

The development of operational strategies for wind farms as an integrated plant system to achieve a variety of goals from elevating power production to reducing maintenance needs has generated a great deal of interest in recent years. Achieving these operational goals requires an estimate of the energy available and the wind conditions affecting each turbine. The importance of the aerodynamic interaction of wind turbines with the dynamic atmospheric resource means that wakes (the momentum deficit due to power extraction) and their interactions through the farm have the largest influence on the available energy. Predicting the influence of wakes and their interactions, therefore, form the basis of wind farm control strategies to reduce power production losses, track a power signal, mitigate structural loading, or balance the wear and tear on wind turbines to decrease operation and maintenance costs. The articles in the “Advances in Wind Plant Controls: Strategies, Implementation, and Validation” Special Topic in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy describe the further development and evaluation of wake models and new approaches to wake steering that exploit advances in sensing or estimation to improve control performance.