What if rain could help you to increase wind-turbine production during noise study?

A wind turbine sometimes happens to create noise pollution due to a variety of factors. As most of wind turbines are located nearby private accommodations, your asset consequently needs to respect some acoustic standards.

How is your wind turbine activity restricted by sound?

When setting up a wind turbine plant, an acoustic study is carried out to determine the difference of noise production between an ‘off’ and an ‘on’ plant, those differences of noise are called “acoustic emergences”. This study could lead to a curtailment plan, which determinates when to slow down / stop the plant’s activity to prevent it from producing emergences.

How rain impacts the sound production

As an acoustic pollution itself, rain is a very good friend to your wind turbine. Indeed, as it produces a noise, water drop reduces the acoustic emergences’ level of the wind turbine.
Curtailment plans should therefore be adjusted for rainy situations: the harder it rains, the less acoustic emergences your wind turbine creates, because rain increases ambient noise.

What process for the rain to be taken into account?

For the rain to be taken into consideration in the curtailment plan conception, we can picture a strategy:

1. Installing a rain-sensitive sound sensor during the curtailment plan’s conception, this first step will allow us to determinate how sound emergences are impacted. This study should also take into account the rain’s intensity.
2. Sorting out curtailment plans according to different raining intensity
3. Placing a rain sensor on the Wind-Turbine. Linked to the Scada “monitoring of the Wind-Turbine”, this sensor should allow us to get a dynamic control of the Wind-Turbine activity depending on the rain’s intensity: if it rains harder, we can increase the plant’s activity.

Unfortunately, this level of accuracy in controlling the wind turbine is not effective yet, but could be relevant for the next few year’s innovations, some wind turbine manufacturers are already working on this.

Greensolver already provides advice in controlling this acoustic study: as your plant’s profitability may be impacted by its precision, we are able to supervise it very closely, and ensure you will not suffer from an inaccurate curtailment plan, that might affect your asset profitability. Do not hesitate to get in touch with our experts!