Clir Renewables has released a new software feature which detects icing on turbine blades and measures its impact on performance. Weather is uncontrollable but assessable, and that's what is required when mitigating icing impacts. Losses due to icing can range from a few percentage points all the way up to over 40% during the icing season.
Blade icing furthermore causes increased loads and reduced aerodynamics, as well as health and safety concerns. Clir developed a solution to automatically detect icing and quantify the associated losses. The algorithm uses a probability analysis approach to flag deviations from historical, turbine-specific power curves, based on site-specific climatic conditions and historical icing events. The icing events are automatically flagged to the user as a part of their standard system, including the losses related to the events. The method is based on International Energy Agency (IEA) Task 19's standardised method for ice loss calculations2 and has been further refined within the Clir system. Based on the results from the algorithm, Clir can make recommendations for optimisation when the wind farm is experiencing icing. As part of this optimisation work, an evaluation of any installed ice detection and mitigation system is undertaken, and the results are also useful for the evaluation of available third-party alternatives.