Forecasting Turbine Icing Events

In this study, we present a method for forecasting icing events. The method is validated at two European wind farms in with known icing events. The icing model used was developed using current ice accretion methods, and newly developed ablation algorithms. The model is driven by inputs from the WRF mesoscale model, allowing for both climatological estimates of icing and short term icing forecasts.

The current model was able to detect periods of icing reasonably well at the warmer site. However at the cold climate site, the model was not able to remove ice quickly enough leading to large ice accumulations, which have not been seen in observations. In addition to the model evaluation we were able to investigate the potential occurrence of ice induced power loss at two wind parks in Europe using observed data.

We found that the potential loss during an icing event is large even when the turbine is not shut down for its protection. We also found that there is a a large spread across the various turbines within a wind park, in the amount of icing. This is currently not taken into account by our model. Evaluating and adding these small scale differences to the model will be undertaken as future work.