On the robustness of active wake control to wind turbine downtime

Abstract

Active wake control (AWC) is an operational strategy for wind farms that aims at reducing the negative effects of wakes behind wind turbines on the power production and mechanical loads at the wind turbines' downstream. For a given wind direction, the strategy relies on collaborative control of the machines within each row of turbines that affect each other through their wakes. The vast amount of research performed during the last decade indicates that the potential upside of this technology on the annual energy production of a wind farm can be as high as a few percentage points. Although these predictions on the potential benefits are quite significant, they typically assume full availability of all turbines within a row operating under AWC. However, even though the availability of offshore wind turbines is nowadays quite high (as high as 95%, or even higher), the availability of a whole row of turbines is shown to be much lower (lower than 60% for a row of ten turbines). This paper studies the impact of turbine downtime on the power production increase from AWC, and concludes that the AWC is robust enough to be kept operational in the presence of turbines standing still.