In addition to human error, manufacturing tolerances for blades and hubs cause pitch angle misalignment in wind turbines. As a consequence, a significant number of turbines used by existing wind farms experience power production loss and a reduced turbine lifetime. Existing techniques, such as photometric technology and laser-based methods, have been used in the wind industry for on-field pitch measurements. However, in some cases, regular techniques have difficulty achieving good and accurate measurements of pitch angle settings, resulting in pitch angle errors that require cost-effective correction on wind farms. Here, the authors present a novel patented method based on laser scanner measurements. The authors applied this new method and achieved successful improvements in the Annual Energy Production of various wind farms. This technique is a benchmarking-based approach for pitch angle calibration. Two case studies are introduced to demonstrate the effectiveness of the pitch angle calibration method to yield Annual Energy Production increase.

A novel multi-criteria methodology for the identification of defective anemometers is shown in this paper with a benchmarking approach: it is called MIDAS: multi-technique identification of defective anemometers. The identification of wrong wind data as provided by malfunctioning devices is very important, because the actual power curve of a wind turbine is conditioned by the quality of its anemometer measurements. Here, we present a novel method applied for the first time to anemometers’ data based on the kernel probability density function and the recent reanalysis ERA5. This estimation improves classical unidimensional methods such as the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, and the use of the global ERA5’s wind data as the first benchmarking reference establishes a general method that can be used anywhere. Therefore, adopting ERA5 as the reference, this method is applied bi-dimensionally for the zonal and meridional components of wind, thus checking both components at the same time. This technique allows the identification of defective anemometers, as well as clear identification of the group of anemometers that works properly. After that, other verification techniques were used versus the faultless anemometers (Taylor diagrams, running correlation and R M S E , and principal component analysis), and coherent results were obtained for all statistical techniques with respect to the multidimensional method. The developed methodology combines the use of this set of techniques and was able to identify the defective anemometers in a wind farm with 10 anemometers located in Northern Europe in a terrain with forests and woodlands. Nevertheless, this methodology is general-purpose and not site-dependent, and in the future, its performance will be studied in other types of terrain and wind farms.

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