A Case Study of Space-time Performance Comparison of Wind Turbines on a Wind Farm
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This paper presents an academia-industry joint case study concerning an effective way to quantify and compare multi-year changes in power production performance of multiple turbines scattered over a mid-size wind farm. This analysis is referred to as a space-time performance comparison. Considering that the wind and environmental inputs to wind turbine generators are stochastic in nature, any analysis testifying to the change in a turbine's performance must have the varying inputs controlled for. This research employs two principal modeling components sequentially to exercise a tight control of multiple input conditions—a covariate matching method followed by a Gaussian process model-based functional comparison. The analysis is applied to a wind farm that houses 66 turbines on a moderately complex terrain. The power production and environmental data span nearly four years, during which period the turbines have gone through multiple technical upgrades. The space-time analysis presents a quantitative and global picture depicting how turbines differ relative to each other as well as how each of them changes over time.
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