Critical analysis of wind farms for sustainable generation

A critical analysis on wind farms has been carried out to improve the perfo rmance and reliability of wind energy system. The effect of its improvement has been studied with the Optimal Renewable Energy Mathematical (OREM) mod el which is developed for sustainable generation in India. The performance and reliability of the wind turbine generators have been evaluated in a dem onstration windfarm (6 MW) in India. The windfarm is situated in Kayathar, a village in the south of Tamil Nadu State. The average technical availabil ity, real availability and capacity factor have been analysed from 1991 to 1995 and they are found to be 92%, 54% and 19% respectively. Fault analysis for grid failures has been done using pareto analysis. The analysis indica tes that when grid drop failures are reduced by 50%, the overall reduction in the frequency of faults would be 35.2%, which is significant. The reliab ility analysis has also been done for the wind turbine generator. The failu re rate is high to an extent of 6.7 x 10(-5) h(-1) in the case of a yaw con trol defect and the factor of reliability is found to be 0.5 at 10 000 h. T he OREM model developed reveals that when the reliability factor of wind en ergy system is improved from 0.5 to 0.9 then the utilisation of wind energy would be increased by 82%. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. Al rights reserv ed.