Multivariate SCADA Data Analysis Methods for Real-World Wind Turbine Power Curve Monitoring

Due to the stochastic nature of the source, wind turbines operate under non-stationary conditions and the extracted power depends non-trivially on ambient conditions and working parameters. It is therefore difficult to establish a normal behavior model for monitoring the performance of a wind turbine and the most employed approach is to be driven by data. The power curve of a wind turbine is the relation between the wind intensity and the extracted power and is widely employed for monitoring wind turbine performance. On the grounds of the above considerations, a recent trend regarding wind turbine power curve analysis consists of the incorporation of the main working parameters (as, for example, the rotor speed or the blade pitch) as input variables of a multivariate regression whose target is the power. In this study, a method for multivariate wind turbine power curve analysis is proposed: it is based on sequential features selection, which employs Support Vector Regression with Gaussian Kernel. One of the most innovative aspects of this study is that the set of possible covariates includes also minimum, maximum and standard deviation of the most important environmental and operational variables. Three test cases of practical interest are contemplated: a Senvion MM92, a Vestas V90 and a Vestas V117 wind turbines owned by the ENGIE Italia company. It is shown that the selection of the covariates depends remarkably on the wind turbine model and this aspect should therefore be taken in consideration in order to customize the data-driven monitoring of the power curve. The obtained error metrics are competitive and in general lower with respect to the state of the art in the literature. Furthermore, minimum, maximum and standard deviation of the main environmental and operation variables are abundantly selected by the feature selection algorithm: this result indicates that the richness of the measurement channels contained in wind turbine Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) data sets should be exploited for monitoring the performance as reliably as possible.

Automated summary

Wind turbines operate under non-stationary conditions and their power curve analysis is challenging due to the complex relationship between ambient conditions and working parameters. A data-driven approach is commonly employed for monitoring wind turbine performance. This study introduces a method for multivariate wind turbine power curve analysis based on Support Vector Regression with feature selection, showing competitive error metrics and the importance of environmental and operational variables.