Curtailed operation of a wind power plant by deactivation of wind turbines

Abstract

The invention relates to a method for operating a group of wind turbines in a wind power plant coupled to a utility grid, comprising the steps of determining that a wind turbine should be deactivated in response to receiving a power curtailment command from the grid, and retrieving data from each wind turbine in the group of wind turbines. Further, the method no comprises ranking all the wind turbines according to a set of ranking criteria and based on the retrieved data, and selecting a wind turbine to be deactivated based on the ranking. Further, the steps of data retrieval and ranking of all the wind turbines including any deactivated wind turbines in the group are repeated at time intervals, and the wind turbine to be deactivated is re-selected based on this updated ranking. The data may include a down time for any presently deactivated wind turbine in the group of wind turbines, reflecting for how long time the wind turbine has been presently deactivated, and the set of ranking criteria may then comprise a pause criterion taking into account the down time.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.