Integrated Wind Plant Control

Primary Objective

Develop the technical capabilities, methods, and approaches to enable “smart” plant control design to optimize wind power plants for both land-based and offshore applications.

Smart wind plant control optimizes full plant output and cuts energy losses in typical plant interactions based on inputs that are plant-wide in nature and enabled by advanced controllers that use information shared between machines and other sources, such as intra-array flow monitoring from lidar and sophisticated estimation algorithms. This capability incorporates a large set of disparate inputs, including energy production, reliability, raw material costs, services to the utility grid, and uncertainty reduction. Employing physics-based understanding gleaned from the high-fidelity modeling efforts in A2e, the Integrated Wind Plant Control Focus Area also can create a foundation for performance improvements to benefit both legacy and future wind plants.

Focus Area Goals

• Enable modeling for wind plant control design
• Enable the ability to sense, estimate, and control atmospheric flow in a wind plant
• Revolutionize controllable wind plants
• Establish control-based optimization of existing wind power plants