Pitch Based Wind Turbine Intelligent Speed Setpoint Adjustment Algorithms

This work is aimed at optimizing the wind turbine rotor speed setpoint algorithm. Several intelligent adjustment strategies have been investigated in order to improve a reward function that takes into account the power captured from the wind and the turbine speed error. After different approaches including Reinforcement Learning, the best results were obtained using a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-based wind turbine speed setpoint algorithm. A reward improvement of up to 10.67% has been achieved using PSO compared to a constant approach and 0.48% compared to a conventional approach. We conclude that the pitch angle is the most adequate input variable for the turbine speed setpoint algorithm compared to others such as rotor speed, or rotor angular acceleration.This research was supported by the Basque Government through the projects IG-2011/0000794, S-PE11UN061 and S-PE12UN015, and by the Argolabe Ingenieria SL Company. Some of the authors belong to Computational Intelligence Group of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), supported by the Basque Government