Inter-turbine modelling of wind-farm power using multi-task learning

Because of the global need to increase power production from renewable energy resources, developments in the online monitoring of the associated infrastructure is of interest to reduce operation and maintenance costs. However, challenges exist for data-driven approaches to this problem, such as incomplete or limited histories of labelled damage-state data, operational and environmental variability, or the desire for the quantification of uncertainty to support risk management. This work first introduces a probabilistic regression model for predicting wind-turbine power, which adjusts for wake-effects learned from data. Spatial correlations in the learned model parameters for different tasks (turbines) are then leveraged in a hierarchical Bayesian model (an approach to multi-task learning) to develop a “metamodel”, which can be used to make power-predictions which adjust for turbine location—including on previously unobserved turbines not included in the training data. The results show that the metamodel is able to outperform a series of benchmark models, while demonstrating a novel strategy for making efficient use of data for inference in populations of structures, in particular where correlations exist in the variable(s) of interest (such as those from wind-turbine wake-effects).