Improving wind farm power output through deactivating selected wind turbines

Optimal design of wind turbine placement in a wind farm is one of the most effective tools to reduce wake power losses by alleviating the wake effect in the wind farm. In comparison to the discrete grid-based wind farm design method, the continuous coordinate method has the property of continuously varying the placement of wind turbines, and hence, is far more capable of obtaining the global optimum solutions. In this paper, the coordinate method was applied to optimize the layout of a real offshore wind farm for both simplified and realistic wind conditions. A new analytical wake model (Jensen-Gaussian model) taking into account the wake velocity variation in the radial direction was employed for the optimization study. The means of handling the irregular real wind farm boundary were proposed to guarantee that the optimized wind turbine positions are feasible within the wind farm boundary, and the discretization method was applied for the evaluation of wind farm power output under Weibull distribution. By investigating the wind farm layout optimization under different wind conditions, it showed that the total wind farm power output increased linearly with an increasing number of wind turbines. Under some particular wind conditions (e.g., constant wind speed and wind direction, and Weibull distribution), almost the same power losses were obtained under the wake effect of some adjacent wind turbine numbers. A common feature of the wind turbine placements regardless of the wind conditions was that they were distributed along the wind farm boundary as much as possible in order to alleviate the wake effect.

Large scale wind power penetration has a significant impact on the reliability of the electric generation systems. A wind farm consists of a large number of wind turbine generators (WTGs). A major difficulty in modeling wind farms is that the WTG not have an independent capacity distribution due to the dependence of the individual turbine output on the same energy source, the wind. In this paper, a model of the wind farm output power considering multi-wake effects is established according to the probability distribution of the wind speed and the characteristic of the wind generator output power: based on the simple Jenson wake effect model, the wake effect with wind speed sheer model and the detail wake effect model with the detail shade areas of the upstream wind turbines are discussed respectively. Compared to the individual wake effect model, this model takes the wind farm as a whole and considers the multi-wakes effect on the same unit. As a result the loss of the velocity inside the wind farm is considered more exactly. Furthermore, considering the features of sequentially and self-correlation of wind speed, an auto-regressive and moving average (ARMA) model for wind speed is built up. Also the reliability model of wind farm is built when the output characteristics of wind power generation units, correlation of wind speeds among different wind farms, outage model of wind power generation units, wake effect of wind farm and air temperature are considered. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed models. These models can be used to research the reliability of power grid containing wind farms, wind farm capacity credit as well as the interconnection among wind farms

In this study, large-eddy simulations (LESs) were performed to investigate the effects of changing wind direction on the turbine wakes and associated power losses in the Horns Rev offshore wind farm. In the LES framework, the turbulent subgrid-scale stresses are parameterized using a tuning-free Lagrangian scale-dependent dynamic model, and the turbine-induced forces are computed using a dynamic actuator-disk model with rotation (ADM-R). This dynamic ADM-R couples blade-element theory with a turbine-specific relation between the blade angular velocity and the shaft torque to compute simultaneously turbine angular velocity and power output. A total of 67 simulations were performed for a wide range of wind direction angles. Results from the simulations show a strong impact of wind direction on the spatial distribution of turbine-wake characteristics, such as velocity deficit and turbulence intensity. This can be explained by the fact that changing the wind angle can be viewed as changing the wind farm layout relative to the incoming wind, while keeping the same wind turbine density. Of particular importance is the effect of wind direction on the distance available for the wakes to recover and expand before encountering other downwind turbines (in full-wake or partial-wake interactions), which affects the power losses from those turbines. As a result, even small changes in wind direction angle can have strong impacts on the total wind farm power output. For example, a change in wind direction of just 10° from the worst-case full-wake condition is found to increase the total power output by as much as 43%. This has important implications for the design of wind farms and the management of the temporal variability of their power output.

Wind power becomes more and more popular in renewables, which has a large proportion in total capacity of the grid system. Since operations of the grid system dependent a lot on the prediction accuracy of power generation, improving the prediction accuracy attracts a lot attention in researchers. Sensors, which can measure weather information, especially wind information, have been used in wind power forecasting to have a better prediction results. However, location of these sensors are usually decided imprudently, because there are no rules indicating where to place these sensors. This paper proposes a method to find an optimized place, where represents the characteristics of the whole wind farm, to install meteorological sensors. Firstly, a support vector machine (SVM) is used as a crude model to predict total wind power output of a wind farm. Then, a group of existing sensors are used as auxiliary inputs of the crude model to improve the prediction results. Improvements are calculated based on sample path analysis during the whole dynamic process. Finally, an optimized place is calculated according to the parameters fitting of a two dimensional normal distribution. A case study is given based on a real wind farm to demonstrate the proposed sensor location optimization method.

During recent years, wind energy has moved from an emerging technology to a nearly competitive technology. This fact, coupled with an increasing global focus on environmental concern and a political desire of a certain level of diversification in the energy supply, ensures wind energy an important role in the future electricity market. For this challenge to be met in a cost-efficient way, a substantial part of new wind turbine installations is foreseen to be erected in big onshore or offshore wind farms. This fact makes the production, loading and reliability of turbines operating under such conditions of particular interest.

Wind power is also known as junk. This is because wind power fluctuations affect the security and stability operation. Wind power wind turbines created is mainly concerned with the speed of wind. Because of the wind direction uncertain, intermittent, and wake effects between each unit wind farm, wind turbines cannot make that kind of power according to the demand for energy as conventional generators. Due to the lack of experimental data, assess the volatility of wind power is still a lack of effective methods. This article studies the sample in a northeast wind farm power, and based on a sliding differential algorithm, distribution fitting and quantitative calculations describe the characteristics of wind power fluctuations. This article studies the sample in a northeast wind farm power, and based on a sliding difference algorithm, through the analysis showed that wind power fluctuations obey t location scale distribution. And it is affected by factors such as spatial and temporal distribution, there is a big difference between the output power fluctuation characteristics of wind farm output power and single wind turbine. This is due to the wind turbine suffered varying differences, and wake effects between field units, making the distribution of frequent power fluctuations; relative to a single unit, the fluctuation of the whole wind farm is more gentle, that is to say with the spatial distribution increased scale, wind power fluctuations presents certain "gentle effect."

Researching on interaction between wind farm and power system, it usually uses simple model to describe the wind farm. The wind turbines in a wind farm always suppose as a coherent generator group, every wind turbines have identical wind speed. As wind turbine locates in the different site in the wind farm, the wind speed at each wind turbines will not change simultaneously. Wake effect is another factor that should take into consideration. So, it needs to get wind speed equivalent model. The equivalent model of wind speed in the wind farm is based on output of power. Gust wind and ramp wind are discussed. Wind farm will change gust wind into step varying wind and make ramp wind into different type wind. The arrangement of wind turbines will also affect equivalent model of wind speed. The result show that the length of wind farm will smooth the power output. It explains why the power output fluctuation of wind farm is smaller than single wind turbine. The onshore wind farm located in Dongtai Jiangsu province is proposed as an example. The equivalent wind speed model and equivalent impedance connected to grid are calculated. The results illustrate the impact of wind speed model on wind farm output.

With the increasing integration of the wind power into the power system, wind farm are required to be controlled as a single unit and have all the same control tasks as conventional power plants. The wind farm central controller receives control orders from Transmission System Operator (TSO), then dispatch the wind power reference to each wind turbine. One of the most commonly used dispatch methods is to dispatch the wind power reference to each wind turbine proportional to each wind turbine's available wind power without the consideration of the wake effect. The wake which depends on the thrust efficient of upstream wind turbines in the wind farm influences the downstream wind speed which determines the available wind power of the downstream wind turbine. Optimize the wind power production of each wind turbine in the wind farm by the optimization of the pitch angle and tip-speed-ratio of each turbine can increase the total available wind power of the wind farm. This paper proposed a new dispatch method which dispatches the wind power reference to each wind turbine proportional to each wind turbine's optimal wind power to increase the available wind power of the whole wind farm. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to obtain the optimal wind power for each wind turbine. A case study is carried out. The available wind power of the wind farm was compared between the traditional dispatch method and the proposed dispatch method with the consideration of the wake effect.

Large renewable power plants connected to the high-voltage network have the potential to make an important contribution to the grid's reactive power management. This is especially true when rather than using a predetermined Q characteristic, the system operator can control the power plant's reactive power output via a direct interface. However, the intermittent nature of the primary resources and today's reactive power requirements inhibit the permanent availability of reactive power from wind and photovoltaic (PV) power plants. This study shows that a synchronized, so-called symbiotic control of PV and wind power plants can vastly increase their capability of fulfilling reactive power demands. This is demonstrated by simulating the properties of a real PV and wind farm located in Germany. Furthermore, generating units coupled to the grid via power electronics have an even larger potential of providing reactive power when their P-Q characteristics are adapted. On the downside, this can lead to an undesired coupling of reactive and active power control in the grid. A symbiosis of wind farms and PV parks can once again improve this situation when smart power allocation methods are employed. An appropriate algorithm has been developed for this study and is tested on the above-mentioned simulation model.

With the development of concentrated wind power areas, new energy’s dispatching problems are more prominent with its fast expansion. However, we can maximize the utilization of wind power under power curtailment conditions by optimal wind power dispatching. The paper studies on the basic theories of wind power turbines, and analyses the power’s control and output characteristics of wind turbine, which analyses the double-fed inductor generator’s excellent decoupling control of power and its excellent reactive power output capability. By studying the characteristics of wind power output, this paper provides a strategy for optimal dispatch in wind power generation. The calculation results show that the total active and reactive power output of the wind farm match the request of dispatch center. And the total active loss and total reactive loss is the least in the meantime.

The reliability of the transmission grid is challenged by the integration of intermittent renewable energy sources into the grid. For model-based reliability studies, it is important to have suitable models available of renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. In this study, we investigate to what extent the power output of wind farms can be modeled with discrete Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). The parameters of the HMMs are inferred from measurement data from multiple turbines in a wind farm. We use these models both for individual turbine output and for total aggregated power output of multiple turbines. When modeling individual turbine output, the hidden process in the HMM is instrumental in capturing the dependencies between the output of the different turbines. It is important to account for these dependencies in order to correctly capture the upper quantiles (90%, 95%, 99%) of the distribution of the wind farm aggregated power output. We show that despite their simple structure, HMMs are able to reproduce important features of the power output of wind farms. This opens up possibilities to model and analyze these features with methods and techniques stemming from the field of Markov models and stochastic processes.

Effects of Large Scale Wind Power on Total System Variability and Operation: Case Study of Northern Ireland

This brief paper proposes a novel data-driven control scheme to maximize the total power output of wind farms subject to strong aerodynamic interactions among wind turbines. The proposed method is model-free and has strong robustness, adaptability and applicability. Particularly, distinct from state-of-the-art data-driven wind farm control methods that commonly employ the steady-state or time-averaged data (such as turbines' power outputs under steady wind conditions or from steady-state models) to carry out learning, the proposed method directly mines in-depth the time-series data measured at turbine rotors under time-varying wind conditions to achieve farm-level power maximization. The control scheme is built on a novel multi-player deep reinforcement learning method (MPDRL), in which a special critic-actor-distractor structure, along with deep neural networks (DNNs), is designed to handle the stochastic feature of wind speeds and learn optimal control policies subject to a user-defined performance metric. 
\nThe effectiveness, robustness and scalability of the proposed MPDRL-based wind farm control method are tested by prototypical case studies with a dynamic wind farm simulator. Compared with the commonly employed greedy strategy, the proposed method leads to clear increases in farm-level power generation in case studies.

The aim of this paper is to present a decentralized model-free approach to wind farm power optimization with limited information sharing among the turbines. Two decentralized discrete adaptive filtering algorithms are proposed to optimize a wind farm's total power output without utilizing the wind farm power generation model, and with only limited information sharing among neighbor turbines. Convergence results of the proposed algorithms are presented. The proposed algorithms are further extended to track the time-varying environment. Simulation results show that when turbines in the wind farm employ the proposed decentralized algorithms, the total power output of the turbines quickly converges to or very close to the optimal total power generation. The ability to maximize the power output in time-varying environment is also demonstrated. Finally, the proposed algorithms are demonstrated to be robust in realistic conditions, where large magnitude environmental disturbances are considered.

This paper proposes a coordinated operational strategy of energy storage system (ESS) and wind farm to reduce wind power spillage and alleviate wind power fluctuation. Firstly, power curve of a wind farm, in the form of an equivalent wind turbine, is determined by least square fitting. Based on the power output characteristic of the wind farm and historic operating data, the statistical properties of wind power spillage and fluctuation can be obtained. Secondly, the target for wind farm and ESS power output is calculated. Power generation/absorption capabilities of ESS and available power output reducing range of the wind farm are quantified as well, considering the operational constraints of ESS and dispatched wind power output. Finally, a coordinated operational strategy is developed not only to adjust the combined ESS and wind farm to meet the dispatch requirement, but also to ensure ESS and the wind farm to satisfy operational constraints. Case studies are conducted on a practical wind farm with battery energy storage system installed, which demonstrate that the coordination of ESS can greatly boost the revenue and improve power quality of wind farm.