Power curve modelling of wind turbines‐ A comparison study

Abstract

Abstract Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWTs) are the common types used for generating energy using wind farms. For energy estimation studies, these turbines are modelled by their manufacturer Power‐Speed (P–V) curves which are usually expressed using generic equations. In the literature, several formulas are used to represent the P–V characteristics of the wind turbines. However, no substantial comparisons between the accuracy of these models are presented in the these works. The main objective here is to provide detailed comparisons between the accuracy of several P–V models, using several goodness of fit tests, such as, root mean square error (RMSE), coefficient of determination (R2), root mean biased error (RMBE) and Chi‐square (χ2) tests. Several real wind turbines (around 150 wind turbines) with their experimental data are used in this study. The results shows that the exponential model q9 has the highest correlation with respect to the manufacturer models with around (0.1) RMSE. In order to test the suitability of the estimated P–V characteristics in real applications, they have been used in estimating the energy output of four real wind farms in Jordan: Tafila, Hofa, Al Rajef, and Deahan. The estimated energy output is compared with the measured values of these wind farms. The results obtained shows a good correlation between the estimated energy output and the measured output obtained by the operators of these wind farms.