A SCADA-informed evaluation method for wake-induced power losses considering the flow heterogeneity within large-scale wind farm

The wake effect leads to power losses and increased fatigue loads in wind turbines, which is even more prominent in large-scale wind farms. Accurate evaluation of wake effect is an important part of wind farm array design. The existing evaluation methods of wake effect generally adopt the assumption of uniform inflow for the entire wind farm, which does not correspond to the actual wind condition and results in the limitation of wake effect evaluation. In this paper, a wake evaluation method that explicitly accounts for spatial heterogeneity in the environmental wind field is developed, then the method is applied to two offshore wind farms in Guangdong, China. Each individual wind turbine is assigned its own inflow wind direction based on SCADA data, besides, wake expansion model and deflection model are adopted to determine the wind turbine that is under the wake effect of upstream wind turbine. Results indicate that wake assessments accounting for the non-uniform internal flow within the wind farm are more physically consistent than those obtained under the uniform-inflow assumption.