A parametric model for wind turbine power curves incorporating environmental conditions

TLDR: An open-source model which can generate the power curve of any turbine, adapted to the specific conditions of any site, is developed and validated against the manufacturer power curves of 91 turbine models.

About: This article is published in Renewable Energy.The article was published on 2020-09-01 and is currently open access. It has received 58 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Turbine & Wind speed.

Figures

Figure 2: Illustration of the method used to calculate the effect of turbulence intensity on the power curve: the upper, middle and lower plots represent respectively the original power curve, the different Kernels and the final power curve. An example of calculation for a wind speed of 11 m/s is provided.

Figure 6: Influence of the wind shear (a) and the wind veer (b) on the power curve of a typical 2-MW wind turbine (80-meter rotor diameter and hub-height of 60 meters)

Figure 10: Distribution of the cut-off wind speed from the European dataset of thewindpower.net [44]

Figure 9: Left: Power coefficient as a function of the wind speed for the power curves available in thewindpower.net [44] dataset. Right: distribution of the maximal power coefficient evaluated for all available power curves.

Figure 12: Comparison of the model output with the power curves of three wind turbines which are modelled with high quality. The three rows show the wind turbines 258, 263 and 270 of thewindpower.net [44]

Table A.2: Coefficients of the different parameterisation of Cp found in the literature

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions mentioned in the paper "A parametric model for wind turbine power curves incorporating environmental conditions" ?

The typical shape of a power curve is well known and has been studied extensively. The model is described, the impact of each technical and environmental feature is examined, and it is then validated against the manufacturer power curves of 91 turbine models. The authors therefore develop an open-source model for pitch regulated horizontal axis wind turbine which can generate the power curve of any turbine, adapted to the specific conditions of any site. 

Q2. What is the effect of high frequency variations on the power curve?

Since the relationship between wind power and wind speed184 is non-linear, the effect of high frequency variations in the wind speed on the power must be taken into185 consideration [28]. 

Q3. What is the effect of the wind speed on the power curve?

As soon as the rotational speed is bounded by the maximal rotational311 speed, increase of the wind speed brings about decrease of the power coefficient which can ultimately results312 in a decrease of the power (blue curves in Figure 8-a).313 

Q4. What is the sensitivity of the power curve for a wind turbine?

It is interesting to note that for very small rotors, the power curves move away from a cubic increase309 and even decrease at high wind speed. 

Q5. How many turbines are shown in the left plot?

The power coefficient is plotted as a function of wind speed for all turbines in the left350 plot, and a histogram of the maximum values for each turbine is shown in the right plot. 

Q6. What is the effect of the cut-off wind speed on the power curve?

It can be observed that the cut-off wind speed has the315 largest impact on the power curve while the sensitivity of the power curve to the cut-in wind speed is316 moderate. 

Q7. What is the effect of wind veer on the power curve of a 2-MW wind?

the effect of wind veer is larger that that of the wind shear because260 the effective wind speed decreases above and under the hub so that there is no balancing effect. 

Q8. Why is the sensitivity of the model to the minimum speed more pronounced?

The sensitivity of the model to the minimum rotation speed is more pronounced and should accordingly be329 carefully chosen since the frequency of occurrence of the wind speed in the interval 3-9 m/s is high.330