Field experiment of wind farm power optimization through wake steering

Due to greedy individual wind turbine operation, aerodynamic wakes reduce total wind farm power production, thereby increasing the cost of electricity for this resource. Considering the wind farm as a collective, we designed a wake steering control method to increase the power production of wind farms. The method was tested in a multi-turbine array at an operational wind farm where it statistically significantly increased the power production. The analytic gradient-based wind farm power optimization methodology developed can optimize the yaw misalignment angles for large wind farms on the order of seconds.