Distributed Power Optimization of Large Wind Farms Using ADMM for Real-Time Control

In a wind farm, the interactions between turbines caused by wakes can significantly reduce the power output of the wind farm. Cooperative control among the turbines has the potential to improve the power output. However, existing centralized power optimization methods are computationally expensive and does not scale well for large wind farms, limiting their practical use in real-time control for time-varying wind conditions and turbine configuration (with adding or maintaining of turbines). To address this problem, this paper proposes a fully distributed power optimization method for wind farms using alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The proposed method allows the wind farm power output to be optimized in fully distributed manner with turbine-to-turbine message passing over a mesh network, guarantees the implemented control actions satisfy the control constraints of all turbines, and provably converges to a stationary point of the wind farm power optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly reduce the computation time with hardly sacrificing the power gain compared with centralized method and thus is computationally efficient for real-time power optimization of large wind farms.