IoT Applications in Wind Energy Conversion Systems

Renewable energy reliability has been the main agenda nowadays, where the internet of things (IoT) is a crucial research direction with a lot of opportunities for improvement and challenging work. Data obtained from IoT is converted into actionable information to improve wind turbine performance, driving wind energy cost down and reducing risk. However, the implementation in IoT is a challenging task because the wind turbine system level and component level need real-time control. So, this paper is dedicated to investigating wind resource assessment and lifetime estimation of wind power modules using IoT. To illustrate this issue, a model is built with sub-models of an aerodynamic rotor connected directly to a multi-pole variable speed permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) with variable speed control, pitch angle control and full-scale converter connected to the grid. Besides, a large number of various sensors for measurement of wind parameters are integrated with IoT. Simulations are constructed with Matlab/Simulink and IoT ’Thingspeak’ Mathworks web service. IoT has proved to increase the reliability of measurement strategies, monitoring accuracy, and quality assurance.