Megavind Suggests Ways to Optimize Wind Farms

Danish strategic partnership Megavind has recently presented the report “Increasing the value of wind in energy systems with large shares of wind”. The ninth strategy report from Megavind provides recommendations with a focus on the internal optimization of wind farms. 

The report discusses future technological innovation opportunities for wind farms in regions with large shares of wind.

In these regions, wind energy helps move electricity prices down. The more wind turbines are erected, the longer and more frequent are the periods when the wind farm owners receive lower prices for electricity production. This trend is not only in Denmark, but also in the UK, Spain and Germany, which also have areas with numerous installed wind farms.

The new Megavind strategy focuses on how to increase the value of the electricity from wind farms in these areas through optimization and technology development. A number of experts from the wind energy industry stand behind the report. One of them is Poul Ejnar Sørensen, the professor at DTU Wind Energy and lead author of the report. Professor Sørensen said: “The most interesting recommendations include six focus areas that are assessed to have both a great potential to be implemented and great opportunity to create high value for the industry.” 

The report’s six focus areas deal with various internal components of a wind farm, including several listed ideas and recommendations to the industry. The first focus area is ‘retrofitting’ of selected components of wind turbines. Here the aim is to increase the overall life of the turbines. The report’s second theme concerns the coordination of the distribution of power output between individual turbines in a wind farm. Here the focus is on the distribution of lifetime consumption between the individual wind turbines.

The report’s third recommendation is to develop systematic diagnostic methods to reduce production loss due to errors, while the fourth is that the voltage level of wind farms collection network increases. The fifth recommendation points to the potential for reducing investment costs for reactive power compensation equipment. Finally, it is recommended that there should be a focus on sales of new ancillary services, which become relevant when fewer and fewer conventional power plants are in operation due to high wind production.

Since the report focuses on the internal optimization, it does not include external factors that can affect a wind farm.

The strategy focuses only on technology improvements that can be made within the wind farm to increase the value of the produced electricity. Market mechanisms and increased uptake by means of electric vehicles and smart grid is outside the focus of the strategy area.

Offshore WIND Staff; Image: Siemens (Illustration)