TECHNICAL AREA Project: Optimization of the wind farm´s all-round management

The management system of a wind farm is a basic tool is the explotation phase. The special characteristics of this type of installation require, not only the disponibility of a monitoring system which allows the supervision and control of certain parameters of operation, but also the use of an informatic application which allows the drawing up of reports of explotation that tend to optimize the wind generation of the farm.

The existence in the wind farm of wind turbines of five different manufacturers explains that, from the point of view of supervision and control, Sotavento Wind Farm presents some technical peculiarities that differ from the ones presented by other wind power explotations. These peculiarities could be reflected on the following aspects:

• Use, by every technologyst, of his own SCADA system and his own data storage with files not ajusted to any pattern format.
• Access to information with different privileges and, in the case of some technologies, in a not authomatic way.
• Measuring equipments located, depending on the wind technology, at different points of the electricity network of the wind turbine.
• Unsynchronization between SCADAS of technologyst and between wind turbines made by the same manufacturer.
• Lack of data, in determined periods of time, due to the lost of stability of communication between SCADA of tecnologyst and PLC of machine.

Sotavento Galicia Ldt, being conscious of this diversity of information, is developing an own system of all-round management, with the objective of integrating, in an homogeneus way, the data and incidence parameters from the different systems of the wind farm (wind turbines, meteorological towers and substation) into a simgle database.
Sotavento elaborates reports of explotation which allow the control of the wind turbine´s output in parallel with the ones offered by the technologyst. This factor makes possible the optimization and parametrization of the variables that the promoter wants to control.

The actions carried out in the project, in chronological order are:

1. Integration, in Lan communications network, of the local operation posts existing at the farm´s control room. These accommodate the SCADAS of the five technologysts, meteorological towers and substation.
2. Synchronization between SCADAS and wind turbines referred to single time base.
3. Importation to database of datafile management with ten minutes average of each technology from the respective SCADA.
4. Treatment through routine of datafile programming for homogeneization and definite storage in database:
• Time format of 10 minutes intervals.
• Arranging of variable fields existing in each technology.
5. Importation of files of incidence and failure of the SCADAS to management datafile (central server).
6. Treatment through programming in order to homogenize files of incidences.
• Interpretation of the code of failure in each technology.
• Aplication of unavailability depending on the code of failure.
• Format with common fields (start and end of failure, length, code, description, disponibility depending on the technologyst and Sotavento)
7. Introduction into database of the tasks of maintenance.
8. Programming for drawing up of reports from the management database.

Nowadays, they are obtained the following technical reports of management:

1. Report of energy movement.
2. Report of production by technology.
3. Report of equivalent hours.
4. Report of wind in anemometer towers.
5. Report of wind by wind turbines.
6. Report of availability.
7. Report of power curve.
8. Report of deviation of energy.
9. Time of maintenance response.
10. Comparison between technologies.
11. Integration of topographic and trail effects of the wind turbines.
12. Integration of the power of the turbines and prediction data.

In addition, we are working in the following fields:

• Programming for the drawing up of statistics of failures and automatic importation-exportation of data reports.