Wind Turbine Power Curves Based on the Weibull Cumulative Distribution Function

Abstract

The representation of a wind turbine power curve by means of the cumulative distribution function of a Weibull distribution is investigated in this paper, after having observed the similarity between such a function and real WT power curves. The behavior of wind speed is generally accepted to be described by means of Weibull distributions, and this fact allows researchers to know the frequency of the different wind speeds. However, the proposal of this work consists of using these functions in a different way. The goal is to use Weibull functions for representing wind speed against wind power, and due to this, it must be clear that the interpretation is quite different. This way, the resulting functions cannot be considered as Weibull distributions, but only as Weibull functions used for the modeling of WT power curves. A comparison with simulations carried out by assuming logistic functions as power curves is presented. The reason for using logistic functions for this validation is that they are very good approximations, while the reasons for proposing the use of Weibull functions are that they are continuous, simpler than logistic functions and offer similar results. Additionally, an explanation about a software package has been discussed, which makes it easy to obtain Weibull functions for fitting WT power curves.

Keywords

• wind turbine
• power curve
• curve fitting
• Weibull CDF