A Pragmatic Approach for Selecting a Suitable Wind Turbine for a Wind Farm Considering Different Metrics

This paper presents a new approach to select a suitable wind turbine (WT) for a wind farm (WF) site. In this approach, economy, reliability, resilience, and environmental aspects have been taken into account, as all the four aspects have a great deal of impact on the selection of a WT for a given site. Six commercially available WTs have been considered for this study. The energy output from a WF is significantly affected by wake, hence, in the proposed approach, placement of WTs in a WF is optimized using particle swarm optimization to reduce wake effect while increasing the energy production. A new algorithm has been proposed to find the reliability indices of the WF considering forced outage of WTs. In this context, two important reliability indices, such as expected energy not supplied and availability have been adopted to study the reliable viability of the optimized WF with all the six types of WTs. Power system resilience study has been gaining great deal of importance in recent times, but individual WF resilience study has not been addressed till now. This paper incorporates resilience as one of the criteria to select a suitable WT for any site. A new approach has been described in this regard to quantify the WF operational resilience by proposing an ideal resilience pentagon. The impact of all the six WTs on environment in terms of reduction of greenhouse gas emission has also been considered. Two different shaped WFs (same area) with same wind profile have been considered to study the proposed approach. A priority table has been formulated according to the ranking of WTs for different indices. The results show that the choice of WTs for WFs of different geometrical shape, however, with the same wind profile and the area may be different and largely depend on the choice of decision maker.