What is SUDOCO?
Context
Europe is committed to achieving climate neutrality by 2050, emphasizing energy independence and security. With wind energy expected to play a pivotal role in renewable energy, optimizing large offshore wind farms through advanced control systems is crucial.
Therefore, the next generation of wind farms must evolve into dispatchable systems, meeting energy demands reliably while considering broader environmental and societal impacts. Current wind farm control technologies, as seen in off-shore wind farms, present untapped opportunities within the vast data they generate. Leveraging artificial intelligence, especially machine learning and data mining, opens avenues for data-enabled modeling, monitoring, and decision-making, facilitating the transition toward interoperable and dispatchable wind energy systems. However, this digital evolution also exposes our power supply to increased vulnerability from digital threats.
Challenges
While prior projects concentrated on advancing diverse flow control technologies to optimize individual economic objectives, SUDOCO aims to unify various elements, proactively considering fluctuating external factors such as atmospheric conditions, wind speed, electricity prices, as well as the environmental impact and the security of energy delivery.
The Control Room of the Future
SUDOCO is set to introduce an innovative open-source, data-driven platform designed to achieve an optimal equilibrium between maximizing energy output and mitigating structural stress in wind farms. This platform aims to enhance overall wind farm performance, measured through a time-varying value function. By leveraging physics-based machine learning techniques continuously refined with a wealth of experimental data and deep insights into underlying physics, SUDOCO ensures a robust solution.
The platform not only allows for data-driven decision-making, but integrates at its roots state-of-the-art cybersecurity measures. By leveraging recent advancements in artificial intelligence, this approach directly addresses the security challenges posed by digitalization in power plants
The Control Room of the Future, developed by SUDOCO, promises substantial benefits for operators, developers, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). OEMs have the flexibility to enhance the open-source tools with additional features, developers can minimize operational risks, and operators stand to maximize the financial returns from their wind farms. SUDOCO’s forward-thinking solution empowers stakeholders in the wind energy industry to navigate the complexities of modern power plant management with confidence and efficiency.
Goals
Technical
Implement farm-wide flow control for wind turbines to optimize the balance between energy yield and structural load, potentially reducing costs by up to 10%.
Economic
Develop a monitoring and control system to align wind farm costs with yield, aiming for a 10% reduction in the Cost of Valued Energy (COVE) metric.
Environmental
Optimize the entire wind farm system to decrease lifetime CO2-equivalent emissions by 20%, addressing environmental impacts beyond green energy production.
Social
Enhance (cyber)security to ensure an uninterrupted energy supply, aligning with EU directives and mitigating the impact of physical and cyber threats to less than 10% of baseline values.
