Statistical power curve modeling to estimate wind turbine power output

Abstract

In the wind industry, the power curve serves as a performance index of the wind turbine. The machine-specific power curves are not sufficient to measure the performance of wind turbines in different environmental and geographical conditions. The aim is to develop a site-specific power curve of the wind turbine to estimate its output power. In this article, statistical methods based on empirical power curves are implemented using various techniques such as polynomial regression, splines regression, and smoothing splines regression. In the case of splines regression, instead of randomly selecting knots, the optimal number of knots and their positions are identified using three approaches: particle swarm optimization, half-split, and clustering. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory datasets have been used to develop the models. Imperial investigations show that knot-selection strategies improve the performance of splines regression. However, the smoothing splines-based power curve model estimates more accurately compared with all others.