Posters

Abstract

Wind Turbine Generators (WTGs) are growing larger and so are the sizes of Wind Power Plants (WPPs). When a larger WPP behaves unexpectedly, the potential impact on the system stability increases proportionally to its size. In the past years, several significant events have highlighted the wind sector's role in system stability. Developers and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are often encountered turbines' tripping without any obvious hardware cause. Due to increasing WTG software parameter list, troubleshooting becomes more time-consuming and lost production increases. The OEM-developer interface can be proven to be a bottleneck for the WPP optimal operation, since it is in many cases inappropriate for processing this number of parameters and monitoring the requirements. Considering less experienced developers, they often have to deal with even greater challenges, since they lack experience in requirement statement and parameter-handling framework, hence they solely rely on the OEMs' guidance. Operators, also struggle sometimes to maintain complete control over the WTG parameters as OEMs keep their grid connection models encrypted due to confidentiality policies. SCADA systems provide access to the log of the WTG parameter values, however not to a design reference, so benchmarking of the SCADA values versus the design values is performed manually. This presentation will give owners an overview of critical grid compliance related aspects, which must be secured before signing the Turbine Supply Agreement (TSA). It will present a list of recommended within the Employer Requirements items that owners need to pay closer attention to during tenders/auctions to obtain extra control of their grid connection. It will, also, touch upon the benefits and timing of a grid specialist team's input prior to the TSA signing. Finally, it will highlight several areas where the digitalisation of the OEM-developer interface will decrease the human error impact on the WPP operation.