Massachusetts Institute of Technology : A new method boosts wind farms' energy output, without new equipment; By modeling the conditions of an entire wind farm rather than individual turbines, engineers can squeeze more power out of existing installations. ...
ENPNewswire-August 12, 2022--Massachusetts Institute of Technology : A new method boosts wind farms' energy output, without new equipment; By modeling the conditions of an entire wind farm rather than individual turbines, engineers can squeeze more power out of existing installations.
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Release date- 11082022 - Virtually all wind turbines, which produce more than 5 percent of the world's electricity, are controlled as if they were individual, free-standing units. In fact, the vast majority are part of larger wind farm installations involving dozens or even hundreds of turbines, whose wakes can affect each other.
Now, engineers at MIT and elsewhere have found that, with no need for any new investment in equipment, the energy output of such wind farm installations can be increased by modeling the wind flow of the entire collection of turbines and optimizing the control of individual units accordingly.
The increase in energy output from a given installation may seem modest - it's about 1.2 percent overall, and 3 percent for optimal wind speeds. But the algorithm can be deployed at any wind farm, and the number of wind farms is rapidly growing to meet accelerated climate goals. If that 1.2 percent energy increase were applied to all the world's existing wind farms, it would be the equivalent of adding more than 3,600 new wind turbines, or enough to power about 3 million homes, and a total gain to power producers of almost a billion dollars per year, the researchers say. And all of this for essentially no cost.
The research is published today in the journal Nature Energy, in a study led by MIT Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Michael F. Howland.
'Essentially all existing utility-scale turbines are controlled 'greedily' and independently,' says Howland. The term 'greedily,' he explains, refers to the fact that they are controlled to maximize only their own power production, as if they were isolated units with no detrimental impact on neighboring turbines.
But in the real world, turbines are deliberately spaced close together in wind farms to achieve economic benefits related to land use (on- or offshore) and to infrastructure such as access roads and transmission lines. This proximity means that turbines are often strongly affected by the turbulent wakes produced by others that are upwind from them - a factor that individual turbine-control...
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