Spring 2023 Release Notes: Find, Fix, Measure
We are excited to announce some major updates to our Find, Fix, Measure™ (FFM) product that will help simplify the workflow for our customers. These...
2 min read
WindESCo Aug 26, 2020 8:00:00 PM
In our last video, we laid out the basic requirements for a successful methodology to assess the energy improvement from wind turbine upgrades: cost-effectiveness, accuracy, and reproducibility. Now we’re going to dive into the details of some standard energy improvement validation methods to see how they hold up.
One of the most common ways of visualizing turbine power performance is the nacelle power curve, a plot of power production versus wind speed measured at the nacelle anemometer.
If you want to assess the energy improvement of a turbine upgrade, this might be the most obvious approach. You plot the average curves in the baseline and optimized states. If the optimized power production is higher for a given wind speed below rated power, you might assume that the turbine upgrade was a success.
Since nacelle wind speed and power data are almost always available, this method can be cost-effective and reproducible. But is it accurate?
Unfortunately, in this case, there is a false assumption that a nacelle power curve is only affected by turbine power performance. In reality, the nacelle power curve can be distorted by many other factors:
These deficiencies make nacelle power curves misleading and inaccurate for assessing power or energy production changes from wind turbine upgrades. Keep an eye out for future videos where we’ll be diving into more energy improvement assessment methods to see how they compare.
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