WFCT

Demowind2 Wind Farm Control Trials (WFCT)

Publieke samenvatting / Public summary

Aanleiding
Despite the wealth of evidence showing the potential benefits of this technology, technical and economic risks pose a real challenge for bringing this technology to market. The offshore wind industry therefore requires the OWA WFCT project as a catalyst to demonstrate WFC schemes in an operational setting before they can be adopted in the wider industry. Once proven, the concept can be rolled out to operational OWF without any need for further technology development, strengthening the competitiveness of the European offshore wind market.

Doelstelling
The aim of the Offshore Wind Accelerator Wind Farm Control Trials (OWA WFCT) project is to implement Wind Farm Control (WFC) on an existing full scale offshore wind farm (OWF) and demonstrate better lifetime economic performance through increased power production, reduced O&M costs, and increased availability and lifetime extension of existing and future assets. Recent projects (FP7 ClusterDesign, FLOW program, NREL activities, OWA projects) report promising results with WFC schemes.

Korte omschrijving
The proposed project is designed to combine experts who have played a leading role in concept generation to date (DTU, ECN, Frazer-Nash) and to investigate a range of different WFC approaches in full scale testing. Several measurement systems will be installed, including strain gauges, multiple nacelle LiDARs and one scanning LiDAR. Based on existing experience it can be expected that pitch- and yaw-based WFC will together result in a 0.5-3.5% increase in energy yield and enable load reductions of up to 50% for some wind turbine components. These promising figures are only based on simulation results changing set points and do not require any modifications to the turbine itself: this brings the enormous advantage of the control strategies being realisable on today's wind farms. However, no solid experimental evidence has yet been publicly disclosed about the performance of WFC schemes in real-life.