CL-Windcon project shows developments on wind farm models during its third General Assembly Meeting hosted by CENER in Pamplona

The CL-Windcon project has recently celebrated its third General Assembly Meeting in Pamplona, hosted by CENER (National Renewable Energy Centre of Spain). During the event, the partners have showcased the main advances of this European project, focused on a new way of approaching the design and operation of a wind farm, based on the wind farm closed loop control paradigm.

Representatives of the 15 organisations which conform the consortium have taken part in this encounter: General Electric, Ramboll, University of Stuttgart, Technical University of Munich and UL International GmbH / DEWI from Germany; Enel Green Power and Politecnico di Milano from Italy; Aalborg University from Denmark; Delft University of Technology and the the Energy research Center of the Netherlands (ECN part of TNO), Garrad Hassan from the United Kingdom, as well as the Spain´s entities Ikerlan-IK4, Qi Europe, ZABALA Innovation Consulting and CENER as project coordinator. Throughout two days, the most important milestones of the project were shared and discussed.

CL-Windcon is funded by the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 of the European Union (agreement nº 727477) and will last until October 2019. The initiative has a total cost of 4.9 M€. The CL-Windcon project is fully aligned with the objectives of the Energy Transition and policies to face the climate change challenge driven by the European Union.

Up to this moment, CL-Windcon project has performed developments over wind farm models, which now conform a set of multi-fidelity tools of wide application to wind farm control design and validation.

Furthermore, because additional cyclic loads are generated when the blades of a wind turbine enter into an upwind turbine wake, CL-Windcon has developed (i) estimators for partial wake overlap detection to be used for triggering countermeasures for reducing wake-generated loads, (ii) a novel closed-loop wake steering methodology, as well as (iii) an individual triggerable pitch control. Additionally, reliability enhancing techniques for management of sensor failure based on sensor redundancy have been proposed for generator speed measurements.

Moreover, validation activities for the turbine control strategies and supporting technologies developed in CL-Windcon have been made. Apart from simulation analyses, three wind tunnel testing campaigns have been performed so far and the fourth one is expected to take place in the following weeks. Instrumentation at the full-scale wind farm has taken place, too.

Finally, the activities for the feasibility assessment of the proposed technologies has already started setting the basis for the common approach. This will allow a sound analysis under different perspectives such as O&M, technology at turbine and farm level, redesign, Life Cycle Cost (LCC), Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and LCoE evaluations, or wind power standards.

The CL-Windcon project includes other transversal activities focused on the dissemination and communication activities and the exploitation of results. The main goal of such activities is to spread the word about the project among the stakeholders of the wind energy sector, policy makers and the general public. The exploitation of results strategy aims to bring to the market the main applications of the project for the sector.

The next steps of the project will be the classification of models and generation of wind farm control, the implementation of high fidelity simulations, the preparation of the wind field experiments, follow up with wind tunnel campaigns and the advance on the feasibility studies. All the progress will be reviewed in next general assembly meeting to be hosted by Polimi at Milano next October 2018.