Posters

Abstract

As the wind industry reaches maturity, wind assets grow older. Most of the areas with the best wind resources in Europe have already been taken by assets that were installed 10 or 15 years ago by the first generation of 2 MW wind turbines. Most of these assets are sometimes maintained to their best specifications, but they lack systems that allow to monitor their real performance. In most cases these stranded wind farms are only managed via time-based availability guarantees, regular maintenance schedules and some basic power curves checks. These sites though remain to have a massive uplift potential if the right monitoring solutions are put in place. On this occasion a real site experience will be presented on how a wind farm was optimised thanks to the installation of independent monitoring solutions together with a close collaboration between the asset owner, the maintenance team and a 3rd party digital solution provider. The monitoring system allowed to detect several performance issues on the farm, ranging from yaw misalignments and rotor imbalances to power curve compliance issues. Several gains on performance and lifetime were achieved thanks to the close cooperation and reactivity between all involved parties. Overall all parties obtained a better understanding of the performance of the wind farm and the alternatives available to improve the wind farm condition.