Abstract
Wind turbine power upgrades have recently become a debated topic in wind energy research. Their assessment poses some challenges and calls for devoted techniques: some reasons are the stochastic nature of the wind and the multivariate dependency of wind turbine power. In this work, two test cases were studied. The former is the yaw management optimization on a 2 MW wind turbine; the latter is a comprehensive control upgrade (pitch, yaw, and cut-out) for 850 kW wind turbines. The upgrade impact was estimated by analyzing the difference between the post-upgrade power and a data-driven simulation of the power if the upgrade did not take place. Therefore, a reliable model for the pre-upgrade power of the wind turbines of interest was needed and, in this work, a principal component regression was employed. The yaw control optimization was shown to provide a 1.3% of production improvement and the control re-powering provided 2.5%. Another qualifying point was that, for the 850 kW wind turbine re-powering, the data quality was sufficient for an upgrade estimate based on power curve analysis and a good agreement with the model result was obtained. Summarizing, evidence of the profitability of wind turbine power upgrades was collected and data-driven methods were elaborated for power upgrade assessment and, in general, for wind turbine performance control and monitoring.
Highlights
The wind capacity worldwide is impressively growing and many multi-megawatt wind turbines have been operating for years
The technology update of wind turbines in their operational lifetime has been flourishing in the latest years and has been producing non-negligible improvements of wind kinetic energy conversion efficiency: the assessment and the methodologies for studying these wind turbine power upgrades constitute the topic of the present work
This makes sense, by a statistical point of view, and by the point of view of wind energy practice: since a wind turbine acts as a filter to the wind fluctuations, the blade pitch, the rotor revolutions per minute and the active power of a wind turbine can likely be used for accounting for the on-site wind conditions [36]
Summary
The wind capacity worldwide is impressively growing and many multi-megawatt wind turbines have been operating for years. The production optimization has two main directions as regards each single wind turbine: On the one side, diminishing the unavailability time through condition-based maintenance strategies. It is estimated that the unavailability time of a modern wind turbine is currently of the order of 3% [1] and can further diminish. The technology update of wind turbines in their operational lifetime has been flourishing in the latest years and has been producing non-negligible improvements of wind kinetic energy conversion efficiency: the assessment and the methodologies for studying these wind turbine power upgrades constitute the topic of the present work. There are basically two types of wind turbine power upgrades that are currently employed in operating wind turbines: aerodynamic and control upgrades, or possibly a combination of the two It should be said that production optimization can be conceived at the wind farm level and there is very interesting scientific research devoted to layout optimization [2,3,4,5,6], wind farm control [7,8,9], and yaw active control for wake interactions management [10,11,12,13,14].
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
