Comparing wind farm production data to engineering wake model simulations

Abstract

This thesis report compare several offshore wind farms and evaluates the accuracy of commonly used wake models for assessing wake losses in offshore wind farms. The aim is to provide insight into the accuracy of these models in estimating power output while taking wake effects into account. Three wake models: NOJ, BastankhahGaussian, and TurbOPark, implemented in the Pywake tool, were compared using data collected from previous studies on Horns Rev 1 offshore wind farm as a reference. While all models showed some errors in estimating real power production, the TurbOPark model gave the closest result to the real Annual Energy Production value and was able to predict the pattern of power variation while overestimating it. The NOJ provided good agreement with observed data in estimating the power deficit of the entire farm, while all models produced similar results for the normalized power of turbines in row 7. These findings suggest that the Pywake wake models can be considered reliable tools for optimizing offshore wind farm production.