Performance analysis of wind turbines using stochastic frontier analysis

Renewable energy sources are getting importance for sustainable energy development and environmental protection. Wind energy is one of the most explicit renewable energy sources in the world and nowadays, they become widespread. The future of wind energy looks bright area for Turkey in both short and long term. Although the fact that the value of installed wind power plants increases day by day, optimization of current wind energy sites becomes an emerging area. In the current literature, the main focused subjects on wind energy researches are related with "How a wind farm can be managed with its most efficient parameters and optimum power generation strategies". This can be achieved by monitoring and improving the performance of wind turbines. Wind farms should be investigated and analyzed in order to improve the farm electricity generation efficiency by using performance analysis. Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate the performance of a wind farm by using efficiency analysis. Stochastic Frontier Analysis was used to calculate efficiency of each wind turbine to compare each other and to determine whole wind farm efficiency. To comment on the effectiveness of the analysis were compared with Data Envelopment Analysis. The proposed approach was tested by using real data of a wind farm in Turkey. Eventually, Turbine 10 was the most inefficient turbine and November was the most inefficient month. The temperature data in Case 2 was found to be a direct correlation with the efficiency. Key Words: Stochastic Frontier Analysis, Wind Farm Efficiency, Wind Turbine Efficiency, Efficiency Analysis.