A team led by DNV has begun work on a joint UK-US project to investigate the effect of wake steering on floating windfarms
The project – CONtrol of FLOating wind farms with Wake Steering or ‘CONFLOWS’ – is being funded by Innovate UK and executed in co-operation with the US National Offshore Wind Research & Development Consortium.
In the UK, in addition to DNV, it includes Durham University and Marine Power Systems, who will combine expertise on wind resource, wake modelling, windfarm control, floating platform design and economic modelling.
A US project team, led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in partnership with Cornell University and Equinor, will focus on specific regions of North America with potential for offshore wind and will perform optimisation studies using windfarm control.
The research project will run until March 2023 and aims to reduce the levelised cost of energy of floating wind by investigating the effect of using wake steering on floating windfarms.
The analysis undertaken will provide an industry-first overview of the effects of using wake steering techniques and determine whether they can have a positive impact on the project costs.
The consortia will share data and knowledge that could be beneficial for the modelling of site-specific meteorological conditions and complex windfarm wake scenarios.
Wake steering attempts to deflect the wake from each turbine in a windfarm away from downstream turbines, enabling increased overall power production and longer turbine lifetimes as a result of reduced fatigue damage.
The project partners note there is growing interest in novel windfarm control strategies that can improve operation of a windfarm as a whole, rather than controlling each wind turbine as if it were operating in isolation from its neighbours.
It is estimated that the gain in annual energy production on an average offshore windfarm that might use wake steering could be more than 1%, a figure that would be significant for asset financing.
DNV will lead the project and continue the development of LongSim, a dynamic windfarm simulator and optimiser for windfarm control applications.
Durham University will lead efforts to develop steady-state wake steering models and calibrate them against high-fidelity data.
Marine Power Systems will lead on sizing its WindSub floating platform, to support the reference NREL 15-MW horizontal axis turbine, and will manage the modelling of the complete system using OrcaFlex software.
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