"While at Youwind I get to work with many of the technical aspects of wind park planning and design, the field that still feels closest to me is that of wake modelling and wind farm control".
"Wind farm control has been the central topic of the first 10 years of my career, in my R&D positions at TU Delft, NREL, and Siemens Gamesa where I had the chance to work on wake steering control, pioneering the first high-fidelity simulations on NREL’s supercomputers, the first engineering model dedicated to the method (FLORIS), and developing the industrial park-level control algorithms (SGRE’s WakeAdapt). This brought the wake control techniques from desktop and wind tunnel tests to the first industrial applications. During the same period, the interest in the field grew and many researchers from academia, national labs, and industry contributed to enhancing the modelling and algorithms". Pieter Gebraad
At Youwind Renewables, we were approached in 2022 and asked to join the SUDOCO project, a large EU HORIZON project on wind farm control. This gave us the opportunity to be at the frontier of wind farm control development, working together with strong research partners: the universities TU Delft, DTU, TUM, and Polimi, and industrial partners Shell and SOWENTO.
While much has happened in the field of wake control in the last decade, many challenges remain. To mention a few: the need to refine wake modelling and control with measurement data from real wind parks to enhance reliability, the development of standards when it comes to measuring the benefits of wind farm control from SCADA data, and the accessibility of optimization tools for wind farm control.
To the last topic, we are contributing actively in the SUDOCO project. Youwind is the lead for Work Package 4 in SUDOCO, titled Control Room of the Future. The primary objective is to integrate SUDOCO's developed models and methodologies for wind park control developed by the different partners into a single, cohesive control room software package.
Beyond integration, we focus on aligning the software’s purposes with industry needs. Hereby we go beyond the optimization of Annual Energy Production (AEP) through wind farm control and take into account the loads impact of the control strategy and use costing and pricing mechanisms for deciding whether to use the wake control in particular circumstances. With this, the SUDOCO project equips developers and operators with tools to make informed decisions, considering future energy markets and the environmental optimization of wind farms.
Youwind is well-positioned to bridge industry requirements with the latest academic advancements, and we actively engage our clients through webinars to inform them of upcoming innovations.
If you would like to learn more about the SUDOCO project, you can do so by visiting their website.
SUDOCO is funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe Programme
Edward Ridgway
