The development of environmentally compatible energy technologies has been accelerated in response to the growing concern of the impacts from climate change. Wind energy is rapidly emerging as a low carbon, resource efficient, costeffective sustainable technology in the world. Due to the demand of higher power production installations with less environmental impacts, the continuous increase of the size of wind turbines and the recently developed offshore (floating) technologies have led to new challenges in the wind turbine systems. Wind turbines are complex systems with large flexible structures that work under very turbulent and unpredictable environmental conditions for a variable electrical grid. The maximization of wind energy conversion systems, load reduction strategies, mechanical fatigue minimization problems, costs per kilowatt hour reduction strategies, reliability matters, stability problems, and availability (sustainability) aspects demand the use of advanced (multivariable and multiobjective) cooperative control systems to regulate variables such as pitch, torque, power, rotor speed, power factors of every wind turbine, etc. Meanwhile, the purpose of wind turbine monitoring and fault diagnosis systems is to detect and locate degradations and failures in the operation of wind turbine components as early as possible, so that maintenance operations can be performed in due time (e.g., during time periods with low wind speed). Therefore, the number of costly corrective maintenance actions can be reduced and consequently the loss of wind power production due to maintenance operations is minimized. This book is mainly research-oriented, covers, and advances the current stateof-the-art of aforementioned subjects. It provides new understanding, methodologies, and algorithms of control and monitoring, and computer tools for modeling and simulation, along with several illustrative examples and practical case studies, and therefore includes extensive application features not found in solely academic textbooks. This book is primarily intended for researchers and postgraduates in the field of wind turbines, wind energy, and various disciplines ranging from electrical, mechanical to control engineering, and graduate and senior undergraduate students in engineering wishing to expand their knowledge of wind energy systems. The practicing engineers of wind technology will also benefit from the v
