Pulsed Lasers In Lidar Application: Models For Optimizing Wind Turbine Performance

ABSTRACT

Since the appearance of the first wind turbines at the end of the nineteenth century, wind energy has been considered to be a renewable energy source for not just developed countries but also developing countries as well. Thus, since 2004, there has been a steady rise in wind energy production worldwide, with substantial actively installed capacity in Africa. However, due to the fact that wind turbines are highly dynamic systems that are excited by stochastic loads from the wind, variations in this disturbance usually medium-term (-changes during the space of a few hours or minutes cause variations in power output which must be accepted by the system to which the turbine is connected -) and short-term (typically wind gusts which will introduce cyclic loadings which must be absorbed by the wind turbine with high susceptibility to fatigue damage) negatively impacts heavily on Levelized Cost Of Energy (LCOE) of wind energy (i.e., the average cost per unit of energy over the lifetime of the turbine, including capital costs, operations and maintenance costs, and all other relevant expenses).