Digital Twin for Wind Energy: Latest updates from the NorthWind project

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of digital twins for wind farms within the NorthWind project, emphasizing hierarchical capability levels to enhance real-time forecasting, monitoring, and decision-making in wind energy.

Contribution

It introduces a hierarchical scale for assessing digital twin capabilities and reports progress in constructing digital twins at various levels for wind farm components.

Findings

Development of a hierarchical capability scale for digital twins

Progress in constructing digital twins across different capability levels

Enhanced real-time forecasting and monitoring for wind energy

Abstract

NorthWind, a collaborative research initiative supported by the Research Council of Norway, industry stakeholders, and research partners, aims to advance cutting-edge research and innovation in wind energy. The core mission is to reduce wind power costs and foster sustainable growth, with a key focus on the development of digital twins. A digital twin is a virtual representation of physical assets or processes that uses data and simulators to enable real-time forecasting, optimization, monitoring, control and informed decision-making. Recently, a hierarchical scale ranging from 0 to 5 (0 - Standalone, 1 - Descriptive, 2 - Diagnostic, 3 - Predictive, 4 - Prescriptive, 5 - Autonomous has been introduced within the NorthWind project to assess the capabilities of digital twins. This paper elaborates on our progress in constructing digital twins for wind farms and their components across various capability levels.