Fiber Optic Communication in Wind Power Plant(WPP)

Abstract: Wind Energy constitutes 4% of the total electricity produced in the world and is a very significant source of renewable energy. Power generation by wind turbine generators, or WTGs, is a proven green energy technology in both land and offshore environments. However, wind farms located either onshore or offshore are often in remote and not easily accessible locations. Additionally, their height above ground can pose unique maintenance, repair and lightning strike challenges that must be addressed to make wind power renewable energy reliable and economical. The right data and communication cables are very important in wind farms as the farms are usually quite large in area and very often, the environment is quite harsh in such locations. Hence it is necessary to use power transmission cables that are resistant to such conditions, and able to transmit power over long distances with the required efficiency. The two main options that are chosen for transmission cables include Bus-Ethernet and Fibre Optic Cables. Owing to several important reasons, the use of Fibre Optic Cables is highly preferred as compared to the former. Fiber optics (FO) technology is probably best known for use in high-speed, high-bandwidth telecommunication applications. But today fiber optics data and control links have replaced copper links in wind turbines and farms making them a critical part of a wind farm operator’s solutions for minimizing costly downtime and service interruption. Optical fibre network provides real-time data capture to monitor wind turbine uptime, performance and power output – even from remote locations. This data is used to track efficiency and trends, plan maintenance schedules, report the power produced and predictive information to the Independent System Operator critical to “Smart Grid” technology

Keywords: Wind power Plant (WPP),Wind energy converter (WEC), Control and Monitoring, Wind Turbine Generators (WTGs),Fibre Optic (FO), Fibre optics communications, Renewable energy,