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The rise in prices of traditional energy sources, the high dependence of many countries on their import, and the associated need for security of supply have led to large investments in new capacity of wind power plants. Although wind power generation is a mature technology and levelized cost of electricity low, there is still room for its improvement. A review of available literature has indicated that wind turbine development in the coming decade will be based on upscaling wind turbines and minor design improvements. These include further improvements in rotor blade aerodynamics, active control of the rotor blade rotation system, and aerodynamic brakes that will lead to increased power generation efficiency. Improvements in system maintenance and early diagnosis of transmission and power-related faults and blade surface damage will reduce wind turbine downtime and increase system reliability and availability. The manufacture of wind turbines with larger dimensions presents problems of transportation and assembly, which are being addressed by manufacturing the blades from segments. Numerical analysis is increasingly being used both in wind turbine efficiency analysis and in stress and vibration analysis. Direct drive is becoming more competitive with traditional power transmission through a gearbox. The trend in offshore wind farms is to increase the size of wind turbines and to place them farther from the coast and in deeper water, which requires new forms of floating foundations. Due to the different work requirements and more difficult conditions of the marine environment, optimization methods for the construction of offshore substructures are currently being developed. There are plans to use 66-kV cables for power transmission from offshore wind farms instead of the current 33-kV cables. Offshore wind farms can play an important role in the transition to a hydrogen economy. In this context, significant capacity is planned for the production of “green” hydrogen by electrolysis from water. First-generation wind turbines are nearing the end of their service life, so strategies are being developed to repower them, extend their life or dismantle and recycle them. Full article

For the first time, the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model with the Wind Farm Parameterization (WFP) modeling method is utilized for a short-range wind power forecast simulation of 48 h of an offshore wind farm with 100 turbines located on the east coast of the China Yellow Sea. The effects of the horizontal multi-grid downsize method were deployed and investigated on this simulation computation. The simulation was validated with the field data from the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, and the results showed that the horizontal mesh downsize method improved the accuracy of wind speed and then wind power forecast. Meanwhile, the wind power plant aerodynamics with turbine wake and sea–land shore effects were investigated, where the wake effects from the wind farm prolonged several miles downstream, evaluated at two wind speeds of 7 m/s and 10 m/s instances captured from the 48 h of simulation. At the same time, it was interesting to find some sea–land atmospheric effects with wind speed oscillation, especially at the higher wind speed condition. Finally, the research results show that the WRF + WFP model for the wind power forecast for production operation may not be ready at this stage; however, they show that the methodology helps to evaluate the wind power plant aerodynamics with wake effects and micrometeorology of the sea–land interconnection region. This plant aerodynamics study set the stage for a wake turbine interaction study in the future, such as one utilizing the NREL FAST.FARM tool. Full article