As part of its Offshore Wind Accelerator programme, Carbon Trust announced the launch of a multimillion euro project, designed to demonstrate how effective implementation of control strategies can reduce the cost of offshore wind.
The new €2.3 million project, Wind Farm Control Trials (WFCT), backed by EnBW, E.ON, innogy, Statoil and Vattenfall, and incorporating know-how from DTU, ECN, Frazer-Nash Consultancy and Windar Photonics, will investigate the impact of strategies that aim to improve energy generation across an entire wind farm, rather than individual turbines.
Despite the wealth of evidence showing the potential benefits of this technology, technical and economic risks pose a challenge for bringing it to market. The OWA WFCT project has been set up with the aim of demonstrating the effectiveness of WFC strategies in an operational setting. Once proven, the concept can be rolled out to operational offshore wind farms across the wider industry.
During the project, different methods of control will be used to optimise power production for the whole wind farm rather than maximising production of individual turbines. The turbine control will be altered by adjusting the blade angle of attack (pitch) and rotation of the nacelle (yaw).
The WFCT study will be the largest and most comprehensive real-life demonstration of the impact of Wind Farm Control (WFC) strategies on the overall performance of a wind farm. Based on these previous studies and simulations undertaken, it is expected that adopting blade pitch or yaw-based WFC strategies would result in increase in energy yield of between 0.5 and 3.5%. It is also expected to possibly enable load reductions of up to 50% for some wind turbine components meaning increased component life therefore reduced operation and maintenance costs.
The project will seek to verify and validate these theories by implementing WFC strategies at an operational wind farm. The first stage of the project involves analysis to determine the most suitable wind farm test site for the trials and an optimisation of the control strategies. The selected wind farm will have extensive measurement equipment installed as part of the validation process for the simulations; including eight nacelle mounted Windar Photonics LiDARs, a scanning LiDAR and load measurements installed on individual turbines.
The trials are expected to be undertaken in 2018 and full results are expected in 2019.
