CORE

The European wind energy sector faces major challenges in terms of market, policy and climate change. In addition, the Belgian players must also take into account the specific challenges in the planned Princess Elisabeth zone (PE zone). It is therefore vital for wind operators to have adapted models and methods.

Points of attention are the changing climate conditions, the wake effect of neighboring parks and factors that influence the wear of the components. The results of the CORE project should allow the right choices to be made both in the redesign of existing wind farms and in the design of new farms.

In the CORE project, a modeling methodology, a forecasting methodology and an optimization methodology will be developed that will be valorized on the basis of 5 pilot cases: 

• Optimisation of the layout in the PE Zone and the wind farms to be upgraded (repowering) based on the control strategies to be developed, taking into account the wake effects and the Natura 2000 preconditions; 
• Optimisation of annual energy production (AEP) and lifespan; and
• Determining the impact on the wind turbulence caused by the PE island and the wind-sea interaction in the first 20m above sea level. 

The project also envisages a reduction in calculation time by a factor of 3 for Large Eddy Simulation models and a factor of 20 for condition monitoring methods is envisaged.

CORE furthermore wants to have a positive impact on the valorisation of the objectives within the wind energy sector by focusing on:

• high-reliability models that can be easily integrated into other systems via APIs; 
• average-reliability models which can support design or O&M; and 
• lower-reliability models which are sufficiently fast (quasi real-time) to be used for operational support