Decentralized feedforward control of wind farms: Prospects and open problems

The problem of load mitigation in wind turbines located in wind farms is addressed. The benefits of letting turbines communicate with and account for their neighbors are explored. First, the idea of exploiting previewed wind speed measurements is examined. The problem is formulated as an H² model matching optimization. The influence of preview length on the performance is analyzed and simulation results are presented. Then, the possibility of cooperation between turbines is studied within a distributed feedforward control scheme. The problem is formulated as a decentralized model matching optimization and several theoretical challenges associated with it are outlined. An approximate frequency domain solution and preliminary simulation results are presented.