A new deliverable is launched by the EU FarmConners project on wind farm control, based on a mini-symposium at the Wind Energy Science Conference 2021.
When Wind Farm Control (WFC) is available at a large scale, additional benefits can be achieved already in the design phase (or preconstruction phase) of a wind project, when the farm is being developed and financed. Indeed, knowing that WFC will be applied later on during the operation phase can strongly influence several key design parameters, such as the farm layout, the turbine size and load envelope, or the electrical infrastructure. Furthermore, accounting for the extra energy production provided by WFC can lead to an increase in the predicted P50 and P90 of the farm (the energy production that the farm has respectively 50% and 90% chance to exceed), which are the quantities typically considered for the bankability a wind project. Therefore WFC can contribute to make the projects more competitive for the tenders and reduce their cost of financing, leading thus to a reduction in the levelized cost of wind energy.
Four ideas came to mind: the combined optimisation of layout and WFC parameters, grid integration, the bankability of WFC, and how to reduce loads. Each of those four topics had a talk on the mini-symposium on WFC on the WESC conference 2021. Here is the short report on the discussions and the slides of the talks.
This is one of the first times the topic has been presented and discussed in detail within the wind energy community. It is hoped that thanks to this initiative and the further development of WFC, more research can be realized in the future regarding this subject, and lead to an enhanced deployment of this technology.