Posters

Abstract

As OEMs and third-party providers increasingly offer wake steering as a commercial upgrade, developers need robust methods to independently validate potential gains. Drawing on operational insights from field campaigns (including AWAKEN), ENGIE R&l has developed a pre-construction assessment methodology designed to estimate a realistic production uplift value taking into account realistic modelling assumptions that hold under field conditions. The approach uses the FLORIS framework to generate optimized yaw offset tables for each turbine. Using site-specific wind measurements, the Annual Energy Production (AEP) is then calculated with and without yaw control to quantify the gain. Hereby, it is critical to include the practical field constraints, such as controller behaviour, to ensure the estimates reflect real-world turbine behaviour. The method has been applied to two large wind farms (more than 50 turbines) that both suffer from significant wake losses and for which ENGIE wanted to investigate the option of wake steering. The results highlighted major differences in potential gain, 0.85% versus 0.14%, depending on layout density and ambient conditions. The study also quantified the sensitivity of these gains to operational factors like wind sector management, yaw hysteresis and maximum misalignment. The analysis shows that evaluating wake steering requires a precise representation of turbine control response and local wind characteristics. Overlooking these practical aspects tends to overestimate the expected benefits. While wake steering can deliver AEP improvements in suitable conditions, particularly in low-turbulence and tight layouts, the sensitivity of the results to control behaviour underscores the need for transparency and performance guarantees before project implementation.