Intelligent wind farm data automation using IEC standards

Abstract

Wind power as a green and renewable source of energy is growing very fast. Governments and utilities around the world have encouraged over the last years the commissioning of wind farm projects — using wind as a clean power source. This led to the development of new standards and architectures to make wind farm data available and meet the requirements for wind farm monitoring. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to automate wind farm data. The solution processes collected data and generates non-operational information that will serve for production and wind power forecasting as well as operational information, such as turbine status, turbine counters, active power of each turbine and total power of the wind farm. Using the IEC 61400 protocol and IEC 61131-3 automation languages embedded in a data concentrator, our solution communicates with various components and concentrates the data to make it available to different clients. In addition, the collected data will be processed to generate statistical information (periodic, minimum, maximum, average and standard deviation) and key indicator information (availability counters, power) thanks to a customized automation module.