The architecture of a large-scale wind power monitoring and forecast system

Wind energy is an important type of renewable energy which has a consistently growing proportion in overall energy production worldwide. Yet, the uncertainty and variability of the wind leads to challenges for transmission system operators (TSOs) during grid management and for wind power plant (WPP) owners during market operations. In order to address these problems, convenient monitoring and forecast of wind power is indispensable. In this paper, we present the architecture of the wind power monitoring and forecast system of Turkey designed and implemented within the scope of the RITM project which primarily aims at large-scale integration of the WPPs in the transmission grid. Although wind power generation in Turkey is its infant stage, with a total installed capacity of 2202.4 MW in operation, the number of WPPs keeps increasing at an accelerated rate and the presented system currently covers 14 WPPs with a total installed capacity of 704.9 MW, hence about 32% of the wind power generation in the country is monitored and the related wind power forecasts are produced. The paper describes the data acquisition, storage, processing, and presentation components of the overall system in details. The described system is significant as its outputs can be utilized by TSOs during grid management and are already being utilized by WPP owners during day-ahead and intra-day market operations. Moreover, the system has advantages over existing systems in other countries in terms of the ease of extensibility, the range of real-time data sources, and the range of forecasts produced.