Analysis of leading edge protection application on wind turbine performance through energy and power decomposition approaches

Wind power production is driven by, and varies with, the stochastic yet uncontrollable wind and environmental inputs. To compare a wind turbine's performance, a direct comparison on power outputs is always confounded by the stochastic effect of weather inputs. It is therefore crucial to control for the weather and environmental influence. Toward that objective, our study proposes an energy decomposition approach. We start with comparing the change in the total energy production and refer to the change in total energy as delta energy. On this delta energy, we apply our decomposition method, which is to separate the portion of energy change due to weather effects from that due to the turbine itself. We derive a set of mathematical relationships allowing us to perform this decomposition and examine the credibility and robustness of the proposed decomposition approach through extensive cross-validation and case studies. We then apply the decomposition approach to Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition data associated with several wind turbines to which leading-edge protection was carried out. Our study shows that the leading-edge protection applied on blades may cause a small decline to the power production efficiency in the short term, although we expect the leading-edge protection to benefit the blade's reliability in the long term.