Statistical Evaluation of SCADA data for Wind Turbine Condition Monitoring and Farm Assessment

Abstract

Operational data from wind farms is crucial for wind turbine condition monitoring and performance assessment. In this paper, we analyse three wind farms with the aim to monitor environmental and operational conditions that might result in underperformance or failures. The assessment includes a simple wind speed characterisation and wake analysis. The evolution of statistical parameters is used to identify anomalous turbine behaviour. In total, 88 turbines and 12 failures are analysed, covering different component failures. Notwithstanding the short period of data available, several operational parameters are found to deviate from the farm trend in some turbines affected by failures. As a result, some parameters show better monitoring capabilities than others, for the detection of certain failures. However, the limitations of SCADA statistics are also shown as not all failures showed anomalies in the observed parameters.