Stochastic model predictive control: Uncertainty impact on wind farm power tracking

Active power control for wind farms is needed to provide ancillary services. One of these services is to track a power reference signal with a wind farm by dynamically de- and uprating the turbines. Due to the stochastic nature of the wind, it is necessary to take this stochastic behavior into account when evaluating control signals. In this paper we present a closed-loop stochastic wind farm controller that evaluates thrust coefficients providing power tracking under uncertain wind speed measurements. The controller is evaluated in a high-fidelity wind farm model simulating a 9-turbine wind farm to demonstrate the stochastic controller under different uncertainty levels on the wind speed measurement and different controller settings. Results illustrate that a stochastic controller provides better tracking performance with respect to its deterministic variant.