Over the last few decades, wind energy has evolved into a large international industry involving major players in the manufacturing, construction, and utility sectors. Coinciding with industry growth, significant technology innovation has resulted in larger turbines and wind plants with lower associated costs of energy. However, the increasing importance of wind energy’s role within the electricity sector imposes more requirements on the technology in terms of performance, reliability, and cost.

To address these changing expectations, the industry has made efforts to achieve a variety of goals, including reducing installed capital costs for the turbine and plant, decreasing the downstream costs for operation and maintenance (O&M), increasing energy production, and minimizing negative external environmental impacts such as noise emission or habitat disruption.

In many cases, these goals involve trade-offs. For example, up-front investment in a robust component design may avoid large downstream costs for component repair and replacement. In another case, the design of a machine with a higher tip speed can reduce required torque and loads through the drivetrain—but at the same time, these higher tip speeds can lead to more aero-acoustic noise that adversely impacts surrounding communities. Trade-offs and techno-economical conflicts such as these exist throughout the entire system.

To fully assess how a change in a design parameter affects myriad system performance and cost objectives, a holistic and integrated approach is needed. Integrated system research, design, development, and operation can provide opportunities for improvements in overall system performance and reductions in the overall cost of energy.

The mission of Task 37 is to improve the practice and application of systems engineering to wind energy research design, development, and operation.

This will be achieved through a set of coordinated international research activities that move the community towards the analysis of wind power plants as holistic systems. Explicit goals of the task are divided into three target areas of impact.

Goal 1: Impact research and industry collaboration

• Enable better communication across researchers and practitioners in different disciplines through standards in data transfer and model interfacing
• Create forums for collaboration among researchers and practitioners through workshops

Goal 2: Impact education

• Promote general knowledge and understanding of systems engineering tools and methods and the overall value of these to wind energy research, design, and development
• Improve the quality of systems engineering by practitioners

Goal 3: Impact wind energy system performance and cost

• Enable system-level analysis, including technology evaluation, multidisciplinary design, analysis and optimization, multi-fidelity modeling, and uncertainty analysis and quantification
  • Investigate and demonstrate how applying the state-of-the-art Multidisciplinary Design, Analysis, and Optimization (MDAO) to wind energy can improve wind turbine and plant design and operation
  • Promote enhanced design of wind turbines and plants through the use of systems engineering tools and methods
• Investigate and demonstrate how applying the state-of-the-art Multidisciplinary Design, Analysis, and Optimization (MDAO) to wind energy can improve wind turbine and plant design and operation
• Promote enhanced design of wind turbines and plants through the use of systems engineering tools and methods

Task 37 Work Packages

To achieve these goals, Task 37 has four primary work packages (WPs).  WP1-WP3 are further divided into turbine and plant subtasks.

• WP1: Guidelines for integrated wind turbine and plant software frameworks
• WP2: Series of reference turbine and plant designs for supporting integrated analysis activities
• WP3: Work towards best-practice MDAO recommendations applied to wind systems
• WP4: Workshops with other IEA Wind tasks on the state-of-the-art in MDAO

Expected results of the effort will include guidelines to support the integration of analytical capabilities for modeling wind turbines and plants; reference wind turbine and plant models that can be used by the entire wind energy research, design, and development community; and reports on best practices in performing MDAO analysis of wind turbines and plants.