Monitoring wind farm energy yield: a critical yet difficult task

With the continuous growth of wind energy installed capacity and the reduction of the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE), wind farms are becoming ever more efficient but with a margin for error (lower than expected energy production) increasingly smaller. 

Monitoring wind farms operation and especially the energy yield is therefore becoming more and more critical for Owners and Asset managers. Despite its importance, it remains today a difficult assessment to be performed with often imprecise results.

The difficulty comes mainly from the numerous factors that can impact energy production (wind resource, wake effects, turbine availability, power curtailment, turbulence intensity, turbine performance, turbine settings, …) combined with a high sensitivity of wind turbine operation (and performance) to the external conditions. If you add the low quality of the data available and the randomness and variability of the wind conditions, you have the recipe for an overwhelming and almost impossible task. 

Illustration of a root-cause analysis of Power Curve energy losses: separate losses from external conditions and performance

We at ExpertWind understand how tricky wind conditions and turbine operation can be: we combine our data processing technology and our expertise to standardise the analysis of wind farms. We separate what is internal from what is external to the turbines, what is caused by external conditions from what is caused by turbine operation and most importantly we quantify and root-cause the energy loss that is actually recoupable. We simplify the work of Asset managers and help them ensure they are extracting the most energy out of their wind farms with precision and with an Expert by their side.

Want to learn more about our technology and services? And how you and your wind farms could benefit from our results? Feel free to reach out and Contact Us.