Wind speed spatial variation in the whole wind wheel rotation plane caused by wind shear and tower shadow effect becomes more obvious with the increase of rotor diameter and tower height, thus the hub height wind speed is not sufficient to represent the actual wind speed effect and the rotor equivalent wind speed should be used. However, the existing rotor equivalent wind speed calculation models do not consider wind turbine operation characteristics, which cannot match the actual power control effect, thus ignoring the power loss caused by actual power control deviation. To address this problem, a rotor equivalent wind speed calculation method based on equivalent power is proposed in this paper, which comprehensively considers wind shear, tower shadow and wind turbine operation characteristics. The rationality of the proposed model was qualitatively evaluated from different power control stages of wind turbine and the validity was quantitatively verified from the aspect of theoretical power calculation. The results demonstrated that the proposed model can effectively reflect the variation law of rotor equivalent wind speed under the actual control effect of different power control stages, which contains the power loss caused by actual power control deviation, thus improving the theoretical power calculation accuracy.