Identification of turbine clusters during time varying wind direction.

An efficient strategy for maximizing the power production of a power plant is to control in a coordinated way only turbines that are aerodynamically coupled through wake effects. The implementation of such control strategy requires the knowledge of which clusters of turbines are coupled through wake interaction. In a previous study, we identified turbine clusters in real-time by evaluating the correlation among the power production signals of the turbines in the farm. In this study we reproduce the more challenging scenario with large-scale variation of the wind direction. Different time windows of data needed to compute the correlation coefficients are tested and characterized in term of accuracy and promptness of the identification.