Open Source Infrastructure for Communications, Control, and Integration of Wind Power

On October 27, 2006, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) approved a new standard, ¿Communications for Monitoring and Control of Wind Power Plants¿ (IEC 6140025), which is yet to achieve commercial support in North America. However the standard has the power, flexibility, and scalability to manage large numbers of wind power plants. This project will develop an open source software, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) package that exploits the standard. The package will act as a control center for a wind farm. IEC 6140025 provides a modeling language to represent each wind power plant. The control center will consolidate individual plant models into a larger aggregate for control and monitoring of distributed wind power systems. The salient features of the control center are: (1) aggregate control and data acquisition of individual power plants within wind farms or distributed sites; (2) configuration management of settings across the wind farm; (3) statistical condition monitoring; (4) performance prediction of both individual equipment and aggregates, and (5) wind power integration into the North American electric grid control systems. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: An IEC6140025 wind farm control center should provide such benefits as: reduced cost and more rapid development for wind power equipment providers; simplified integration of wind power into existing electric grid control; improved cybersecurity for wind power facilities using role based authorization; and open source reference implementation of IEC61400254 Web Services software. These benefits should promote the implementation of international electric power standards.