Maximizing Project Economics Through Project Capacity Overbuild
12 Sep 18
8:30 AM
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10:00 AM
Tracks:
Integration of Siting and Resource Assessment
The wind industry is getting increasingly competitive with the trend in electricity rates heading steadily down. Optimizing wind farms to maximize rate of return, even by a small margin, can make the difference between a project being built, or being shelved. A common mistake is to set a wind farm's nominal name plate capacity (NPC) to available transmission capacity. Nominal NPC is never realized at the point of metering due to collector losses. Furthermore, losses such as availability, curtailment and turbine performance further reduce facility power at specific times, reducing the frequency that a wind farm is at rated. Modern wind farms have the control capability to dynamically curtail specific turbines such that a transmission capacity is never exceed. This allows for the installation of more turbines than a simple nominal capacity would allow, resulting in more energy even after curtailment losses. This overbuild can be tuned to maximize project return.