Considering Air Density Effect on Modelling Wind Farm Power Curve Using Site Measurements

2nd World Conference on Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, İstanbul, Turkey, 12 - 14 May 2017, pp.420-430, (Full Text)

Manufacturers develop power curves for their wind turbines. Customers use these wind turbine power curves for wind farm planning and estimating nearly total production of planned plant. When wind farm is installed and connected to the grid, these power curves are not useful. In literacy, researchers proposed wind turbine
power curve measurement methods to obtain an accurate power curve for turbine on site. But it is not easy to develop power curves for clusters of wind turbines. Developing a single power curve for a wind farm slightly simplifies this problem. Accurate wind farm power curve is a very useful tool for converting wind speed forecasts to power. Also plant owner can use this tool to detect anomalous operations. In this study we developed and tested wind farm power curves by using real site measurements. Two different methods are used to develop power curves. They are polynomial curve fitting and mean bins method.
Wind speed and power output relation is investigated. A method is proposed to add effect of air density on power curve. Developed power curve has two inputs.They are hourly mean wind speed and air density values. This approach uses variable air density in calculation of wind farm power output. Results of this
study showed that performance of mean bins method is better than polynomial curve fitting. Also proposed air density effect adding method improves performances of obtained power curves.