Wind turbine performance analytics: selecting the best solution

If you are looking to select the best solution for analyzing your wind turbine power curves, we recommend that you ask the following questions:

  1. Can the solution perform fully automated analysis and diagnosis of a range of faults, using embedded domain knowledge? This is important to ensure that issues are not only detected, but resolved to create value.
  2. Does the solution include air density and turbulence intensity correction according to the IEC61400-12 standard? If not, then you may end up losing time following up on false alarms.
  3. Does air density correction also include the influence of air pressure and altitude? This can be significant for some wind farms and if ignored, can lead to wrong conclusions about performance.
  4. Is the solution able to detect and categorize effects including icing, wake and curtailment? Often such effects cause high scatter in the power curve. Different operational conditions must be classified in order to understand the true turbine performance.
  5. Does the solution include fully automated learned power curves and trend detection? Manual definition of training periods for learned power curves is very time consuming and next to impossible at large scale.
  6. Can the solution be configured to automatically consider curtailment rules such as noise control, sector-based load control, bat and bird protection? This is important to ensure that such rules are correctly implemented, and the resulting losses are properly accounted for.

By choosing the i4SEE Performance™ application, the answer to these questions will always be yes.