The Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator has announced a new €2.3 million project, Wind Farm Control Trials (WFCT) designed to demonstrate how effective implementation of control strategies can reduce the cost of offshore wind. The project will investigate the impact of focusing on strategies that aim to improve energy generation across an entire wind farm, rather than individual turbines. T
he WFCT project is backed by EnBW, E.ON, innogy, Statoil and Vattenfall incorporating know-how from experts from DTU, ECN, Frazer-Nash Consultancy and Windar Photonics. The project aims to build on previous simulation-based studies. 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 per cent. It is also expected to possibly enable load reductions of up to 50 per cent 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 and load measurements installed on individual turbines. The trials are expected to be undertaken in 2018 and full results are expected in 2019.