Power Curve Estimation With Multivariate Environmental Factors for Inland and Offshore Wind Farms

In the wind industry, a power curve refers to the functional relationship between the power output generated by a wind turbine and the wind speed at the time of power generation. Power curves are used in practice for a number of important tasks including predicting wind power production and assessing a turbine’s energy production efficiency. Nevertheless, actual wind power data indicate that the power output is affected by more than just wind speed. Several other environmental factors, such as wind direction, air density, humidity, turbulence intensity, and wind shears, have potential impact. Yet, in industry practice, as well as in the literature, current power curve models primarily consider wind speed and, sometimes, wind speed and direction. We propose an additive multivariate kernel method that can include the aforementioned environmental factors as a new power curve model. Our model provides, conditional on a given environmental condition, both the point estimation and density estimation of power output. It is able to capture the nonlinear relationships between environmental factors and the wind power output, as well as the high-order interaction effects among some of the environmental factors. Using operational data associated with four turbines in an inland wind farm and two turbines in an offshore wind farm, we demonstrate the improvement achieved by our kernel method.