Conceptual design of a DOT farm generator station

Applied SciencesSustainable Energy Technolog

Conceptual design of a DOT farm generator station

The Delft Offshore Turbine (DOT) is a DUWIND research project that focuses on reducing the cost of offshore wind energy by bringing a radical change in offshore wind turbine technology. The main concept is to centralize electricity generation by having individual wind turbines create a flow of pressurized seawater to a hydropower station. The idea behind the DOT is that the high power to weight ratio from hydraulic drive systems gives the opportunity for a reduced nacelle mass and increased reliability of components by eliminating the use of individual gear trains, generators and power electronics. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this project is not only to suggest an efficient way of exploiting offshore wind but to present a cost efficient assembly. The development of the hydraulic drive train of the individual turbines has been studied over the last 3 years. This paper builds on these results and shows the working of these systems on a wind farm level. The model is built up for a North Sea site with 5MW DOT turbines with a total installed capacity of 1GW. By investigating hydro turbines, the central hydro power station is designed and detailed in this paper.Hydraulic EngineeringCivil Engineering and Geoscience

A supervisory approach to microgrid demand response and climate control

Microgrids equipped with small-scale renewable-energy generation systems and energy storage units offer challenging opportunity from a control point of view. In fact, in order to improve resilience and enable islanded mode, micro-grid energy management systems must dynamically manage controllable loads by considering not only matching energy generation and consumption, but also thermal comfort of the occupants. Thermal comfort, which is often neglected or oversimplified, plays a major role in dynamic demand response, especially in front of intermittent behavior of the renewable energy sources. This paper presents a novel control algorithm for joint demand response management and thermal comfort optimization in a microgrid composed of a block of buildings, a photovoltaic array, a wind turbine, and an energy storage unit. In order to address the large-scale nature of the problem, the proposed control strategy adopt a two-level supervisory strategy: at the lower level, each building employs a local controller that processes only local measurements; at the upper level, a centralized unit supervises and updates the three controllers with the aim of minimizing the aggregate energy cost and thermal discomfort of the microgrid. Comparisons with alternative strategies reveal that the proposed supervisory strategy efficiently manages the demand response so as to sensibly improve independence of the microgrid with respect to the main grid, and guarantees at the same time thermal comfort of the occupants.Accepted Author ManuscriptTeam DeSchutte