Windborne to Identify Yaw Misalignments Across a Large Fleet of Wind Turbines
According to a technical report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (referring to the multi-year Wind Plant Performance Prediction project), modern wind power plants in the United States were underperforming in their expected annual energy output by 3.5%–4.5%.’ [1] There are many potential causes of wind turbine underperformance. Among these are forms of underperformance caused by rotor-disrupted and/or poorly calibrated nacelle-based wind sensors that in turn feed inaccurate wind data to core wind turbine systems.
By Itay Mor, Boaz Peled, Alex Alpert, and Guy Yakir at First Airborne, Israel
To date, wind turbine underperformance has been mostly cost-prohibitive. The budget required to utilise incumbent first-rate wind measurement technologies has been, in most cases, higher than the potential revenue generated from optimising wind turbine energy generation.
