Supervisory controller for reduction of wind turbine loads in curtailed operation

•The supervisory controller perturbates the wind turbine power references.•The reduction of structural fatigue loads is obtained.•Overall improvement in wind turbine operation is gained.•The supervisory controller can be used as a building block of a wind farm controller.

There are situations in which wind turbines must curtail their power, i.e. produce less power than is available from the wind. In such cases the wind turbine power can be increased or decreased if required. This gives an opportunity to strike a balance between varying power production and reducing wind turbine structural loading. To that end, a supervisory controller is designed that issues power references to the wind turbine and can be easily installed on already operational wind turbines. The wind turbine with a supervisory controller produces the required mean power, while reducing wind turbine loads by adding power variations. The extensive, realistic simulations are done to evaluate the influence of the proposed controller on the fatigue loads, extreme loads and the overall wind turbine operation. The results indicate that a significant reduction of fatigue loads can be achieved, which can increase the operating life of the structure. Furthermore, the proposed supervisory controller can be utilized as the main building block of a wind farm controller, which meets the grid code requirements and can be easily installed on very large wind farms due to minimal requirements on the farm-wide communication.