Colloquium "Cooperative Optimal Control of Large-Scale Wind Farms"

Abstract:

With large penetration of wind energy in electricity grids, a requirement to control the wind farm power arises. To fulfill the demands set in the new grid codes every large wind farm needs to be equipped with the controller that enables the tracking of required power. In the first part of this talk an optimal wind farm controller will be described that enables tracking of the power reference, while at the same time achieving reduction of the structural loads on individual wind turbines. With such control system the wind farm becomes a collection of wind turbines that cooperate to produce the required power, while at the same time they optimize their local objectives. Due to the fact that the wind farms being build today comprise a very large number of wind turbines, the proposed optimal control algorithm needs to be very efficient, i.e. it needs to be designed in a manner that ensures timely computations of control signals. In the second part of the talk a computation method based on concepts of parametric programming will be described, which ensures the required computational efficiency and scalability.

CV:

Vedrana Spudić received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree from Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER) in 2007 and 2012, respectively. She has been employed at FER since 2008 as a research assistant at the Department of Control and Computer Engineering. From 2008 to 2011 she was a researcher on the FP7 project Distributed Control of Large-Scale Offshore Wind Farms (AEOLUS). Since 2011 she works on the ACROSS project, where she is a member of the Optimal Control Group. Her research interests include advanced control methods (optimal control, model predictive control, distributed and cooperative control) and control applications in wind energy systems (wind turbine and wind farm control and optimization).