TWAIN. Integrated, Value-based, and Multi-objective Wind Farm Control powered by Artificial Intelligence

TWAIN project aims to develop a decision support environment for wind farm owners and operators to navigate the increasing complexity and volatility of the energy landscape. This digital platform will integrate various factors like market fluctuations, regulatory changes, and environmental conditions into a holistic assessment, enabling more resilient and adaptive green energy production. By incorporating advanced wind farm control (WFC) and assessing the economic, social, and environmental impacts of operational decisions, TWAIN will provide wind farm owners/operators with a comprehensive set of tools to optimise asset management throughout the wind farm’s lifespan.

For reliable and affordable design and operation of wind power plants that also consider system-level stability and security as well as the surrounding natural and social environment, coordinated WFC and asset management solutions play an important role. Additionally, given the urgency of growth implied by ambitious decarbonisation targets, artificial intelligence (AI) and other digitalisation concepts are major accelerators of the energy transition and a key enabler for integrating the processes and prospects of WFC technology into the operation and design of the future energy systems. To support wind farm owners/operators to make better decisions for system-wide optimised performance, TWAIN’s concept pivots on a full-integration of WFC at five different levels: 1) integration of multi-source and multi-format data of varied nature from wind farms in different life stages; 2) AI-enabled integration of multi-disciplinary processes and phenomena affecting the wind farm operation; 3) integration of multi-objective prospects of WFC to assess the true added value of a certain operation mode; 4) integration of multi-level controllers and scenario analyses in decision support provision for harmonious co-existence of wind power plants with their environment and society via optimised operation and design; and 5) integration of wider audience to TWAIN outcomes. TWAIN decision support environment is a digital environment architected for multi-source data integration and optimised computing, which contains a set of toolboxes with the critical analytical steps to operate a wind farm effective and efficiently. It is oriented to wind power asset management by wind farm owners/operators, considering as asset the wind turbine and its components within a wind farm.

As scientific and technical co-coordinator in TWAIN and leader of WP4- Integrating Controllers and Scenarios for Decision Support, CENER will contribute to the data standardisation methodology to effectively enhance wind farm data exploitation; to the advanced data-driven modelling of complex wind farm operation; and to the development of an open-source integrated decision-support tool. This tool will empower wind farm owners and operators to make better informed decisions throughout the wind farm lifetime by bringing together the broader impacts of the plant operation and strategic management. CENER will also lead the testing of these support capabilities through the definition of industrially critical case studies and their integrated impact assessment. Equally, the centre will participate in the validation of expected benefits for the optimised wind farm control in DTU´s Risø Scaled Test Facility, and through high-fidelity simulations for the next generation of wind turbines (>20MW).