Collaborative monitoring of wind turbine performance based on probabilistic power curve comparison

A wind farm is usually equipped with multiple wind turbines of the same type. These wind turbines often work under same complex conditions. Accurate performance degradation monitoring is crucial for ensuring the reliable operation of wind farms and reducing maintenance costs. Motivated by this, this article develops a new wind turbine performance degradation monitoring scheme, which is based on pairwise comparison of the probability power curves of different wind turbines in a wind farm. Firstly, covariate matching is used to eliminate the inherent differences in meteorological variables of different turbines within the same data segment. Next, two probabilistic wind power curves, the quantile power curve and density power curve, model the functional relationship between the meteorological variables and wind power output. Then, deviation vectors are generated by calculating the deviation of probabilistic power curves between each pair of wind turbines. Finally, a directional Hotelling T2 control chart is proposed to monitor the deviation vectors. We apply the new method on the real data of a wind farm in East Britain. Results show that the proposed monitoring technique can monitor wind turbine performance degradation more precisely and comprehensively than the existing approaches.