Renewable Energy: Wind Energy

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Motivation

Recently, wind power has gained greater attention with respect to sources of renewable energy due to the maturity of the technology and its relative cost competitiveness. Wind power farms (WPFs) are scattered in remote areas (onshore and offshore) selected by the wind speed, water depth, and distance to shore. It is important to develop technology to monitor WPFs with higher capacities as the size and number of wind turbines in a WPF is continuously increasing. In order to provide real-time control and monitoring, reliable bi-directional communication infrastructure is needed. According to their needs, most turbine manufacturers have developed their own monitoring and control systems due to an absence of a unified communication architecture. The performance of the system with respect to control and monitoring depends mainly on the communication capabilities supporting the exchange of real-time monitoring data between the control centers and the WPFs. Due to the importance of WPF communication infrastructure, the network should be able to continue to work even in case of device/link failure. Therefore, WPF communication infrastructure requires high stability and reliability in order to effectively control the wind turbines and monitor the local conditions. Also, the communication infrastructure should satisfy the bandwidth and latency requirements for proper data exchange and operation of the wind turbines and the control center.

Conventional WPF communication infrastructure is a switch-based architecture, where independent sets of switches and communication links are used for different network applications including wind turbine generator networks, protection and control networks, and telepho...

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...enter network) in more details. It mainly focuses on the traffic modeling for different sub-networks. Finally, the proposed network models are evaluated through OPNET simulation for small, medium and large-scale WPFs. Chapter 4 studies the EPON-based network architecture for WPFs. Different EPON-based WPF topologies are proposed firstly, and then various protection schemes are considered to increase the network reliability. Optical power budget analysis, reliability analysis and network cost analysis are evaluated through numerical analysis and compared with conventional switch-based architectures for small-scale, medium-scale and large-scale WPFs. Chapter 5 studies the communication architectures for Smart-WPF. Hybrid communication architecture for both wireless-based and wired-based solution are proposed and evaluated through numerical analysis and simulation.