Economic lifetime-aware wind farm control

Abstract. We present the economic lifetime-aware formulation of wind farm control (WFC), a novel approach that incorporates the current state of damage of turbines – either provided by a digital twin or estimated from operational data – to compute control policies that optimize the long-term life management of a wind farm. The optimization is guided by an economic value function that balances power capture (taking into account variable spot market prices) with operation and maintenance (O&M) costs, including potential revenue losses due to turbine downtime. The optimization process is subject to constraints ensuring that the target lifetime of selected turbine components is met, considering varying inflow conditions. This results in optimal control setpoints for each turbine as functions of ambient conditions.

After introducing the economic lifetime-aware WFC approach, the paper analyzes two case studies. The first is a synthetic scenario with a simplified set of environmental conditions, designed to demonstrate the behavior of the new control strategy and its impact on fatigue loads. The second case features the more realistic setup of a small wind farm, with wind climate data derived from a real meteorological mast. The benefits of the proposed methodology are highlighted by comparing it to a range of reference control strategies, which either ignore component damage or address fatigue loads in alternative simplified ways. When compared to greedy and power-maximizing WFC strategies, results show that only the lifetime-aware formulation ensures the achievement of the desired lifetime targets. Additionally, it also results in the best economic performance.