Field Implementation and Trial of Coordinated Control of Wind Farms

Abstract

This paper demonstrates, with live field experiment, the potential of increasing wind farm production through minimising wake effects by curtailing upstream wind turbines. Two 2MW turbines from the SMV (Le Sole de Moulin Vieux) wind farm are used for this. The farm is equipped with state of the art LiDARs (Light Detection And Ranging) for measuring wind characteristics, at a frequency of 1Hz. Simulations are performed using WindPRO for wake effects prediction. Optimised curtailment strategies are simulated for finding optimum curtailment settings of the upstream turbine. Results based on real time data are compared with simulated results. It is found that simulations are mostly in good agreement with field results, with a maximum difference of 1.5%. Analysis shows that a gain of up to 11.5% is possible in downstream turbine production, using a hard curtailment strategy by reducing power of the upstream turbine by about 17%. In this experiment, the combined production of the two turbines decreased with the hard curtailment strategy, indicating that the upstream turbine must be optimally curtailed for avoiding any production loss. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first practical implementation of LiDAR based coordinated control strategies in an operating wind farm.