CL-WINDCON PROJECT SHOWS ITS PROGRESS IN THE GENERAL MEETING HELD IN DELFT

The European project CL-Windcon (Closed Loop Wind Farm Control), which is coordinated by CENER (National Renewable Energy Center of Spain), has already been running for one year since its launch. Recently, the Technical University of Delft has hosted the 2nd General Meeting of the project with the attendance of representatives from the 14 partners participating in the project consortium.

CL-Windcon is funded by the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 of the European Union (agreement nÂș 727477) and will last until October of 2019.

The project proposes a new way of approaching the design and operation of a wind farm, based on the wind farm closed loop control paradigm. The challenge is to achieve an increase in energy production and efficiency, while reducing its uncertainty and the cost of energy, for both existing and new wind farms.

In this way, it is expected to contribute to the policies of the European Union that face scenarios such as energy efficiency, decarbonisation, climate change or the promotion of industries with high innovation potential that create skilled jobs.

At the meeting held in Delft, the main technical advances of the project were showcased:

– Regarding the development of models oriented to the control of wind farms, reference wind farms and simulation scenarios have already been defined with the SOWFA high-fidelity tool. Likewise, the common pre- and post-processing framework has been established to compare results with the different engineering tools under development.

– On the wind farm control technologies and algorithms, a wind turbine controller has been developed with additional features to adapt to the wind farm controller. It will be available to the community in open source.

– Also, within the work package oriented to the demonstration and validation of prototypes, the specifications of the wind tunnel tests have been prepared and the first two campaigns have been executed. As for the experiments in the wind farm, progress has been made in their preparation through the collection of technical data, the specification of the instrumentation and preliminary planning.

Next steps of the project will be focused on the description and classification of the engineering models of the wind farm, the progress of the simulations and the demonstration tests, and the launch of technology feasibility tasks. Third General Meeting will be held in April 2018 in Pamplona (Spain), where partners will present the new developments.