Stochastic Dynamic Programming for Wind Farm Power Maximization

Abstract

Wind plants can increase annual energy production with advanced control algorithms by coordinating the operating points of individual turbine controllers across the farm. It remains a challenge to achieve performance improvements in practice because of the difficulty of utilizing models that capture pertinent complex aerodynamic phenomena while remaining amenable to control design. We formulate a multistage stochastic optimal control problem for wind farm power maximization and show that it can be solved analytically via dynamic programming. In particular, our model incorporates state- and input-dependent multiplicative noise whose distributions capture stochastic wind fluctuations. The optimal control policies and value functions explicitly incorporate the moments of these distributions, establishing a connection between wind flow data and optimal feedback control. We illustrate the results with numerical experiments.