Site matching study of pitch-controlled wind turbine generator

In wind energy utilization the capacity factor and turbine performance index are commonly applied to evaluate a turbine generator’s efficiency. In this paper, a modified turbine performance index is presented to study the suitability problem between wind site and wind turbine based on the Weibull probability function. Firstly four sets of wind speeds randomly generated by computer with given Weibull shape and scale parameters are illustrated to show the effects of the Weibull parameters on wind speed distributions. Further considering a pitch-controlled turbine generator with given operation speeds, the wire-frame graphs for both the capacity factor and performance index are shown for various shape parameters from 1 to 5, and scale parameters from 1 to 25 m/s. For a common case of shape parameter 2, the maximum capacity factor is about 0.56 while the maximum performance index is 0.38 at scale parameter near 17 m/s. There exist some critical points on both kinds of curves at different scale parameters. Wind characteristics collected from 23 sites are considered as examples to show the basic idea of the paper. Through the manner proposed, the engineer could make the best match for wind site and turbine in wind energy application.