Wind turbines produce energy over a lifetime of at least 20 years, and they are designed to withstand the induced loads from the environment. During that long operating time, we cannot avoid causing damage to a turbine and using up the utilized materials. To gain maximum benefit from the material of each turbine, we developed a method which makes best use of their given design damage budget by optimally distributing its usage over the operating time. An operational plan is optimized to do so.

The FarmConners benchmark is the first of its kind to bring a wide variety of data sets, control settings, and model complexities for the (initial) assessment of wind farm flow control benefits. Here we present the first part of the benchmark results for three blind tests with large-scale rotors and 11 participating models in total, via direct power comparisons at the turbines as well as the observed or estimated power gain at the wind farm level under wake steering control strategy.