The Power Curve Working Group’s Assessment of Wind Turbine Power Performance Prediction Methods

Wind-turbine power production deviates from the reference power curve in real-world atmospheric conditions, and correctly predicting turbine power performance requires models to be validated for a wide range of wind turbines using inflow in different locations. The Share-3 exercise is the most recent intelligence-sharing exercise of the Power Curve Working Group, which aims to advance the modeling of turbine performance. The goal of the exercise is to search for modeling methods that reduce error and uncertainty in power prediction when wind shear and turbulence digress from design conditions. Herein, we analyze the data of 55 wind turbine power performance tests from 9 contributing organizations with statistical tests to quantify the skills of the prediction-correction methods. We assess the accuracy and precision of four proposed trial methods against the Baseline method, which uses the conventional definition of power curve with wind speed and air density at hub height to predict power. The trial methods reduce power-production prediction errors compared to the Baseline method at high wind speeds, which contributes heavily to power production; however, the trial correction methods fail to significantly reduce prediction uncertainty in most meteorological conditions. For the meteorological conditions when a wind turbine produces less than the power its reference power curve suggests, using power deviation matrices leads to more accurate power prediction. We also identify that for over half of the submissions, the dataset has a large influence on the effectiveness of a trial method. Overall, this work affirms the value of data-sharing efforts in advancing power-curve modeling and establishes the groundwork for future collaborations.