Vestas and EDPR combine wind and solar with turbine-coupled hybrid demonstrator

EDP Renewables (EDPR, Madrid, Spain), a global leader in the renewable energy sector and one of the world's largest wind energy producers, and Vestas (Aarhus, Denmark), the global leader in wind energy, announced March 27 they have built a turbine-coupled hybrid demonstrator with solar at the Janda III wind farm in Cádiz. The hybrid demonstrator is a combination of an existing Vestas V112-3.0 MW turbine and 372 kW of a new solar photovoltaic (PV). The PV power is fed to the turbine as direct current, which is then converted and transformed by the turbine's ad-hoc modified power conversion system in order to export the power to the grid. By combining wind and PV, the demonstrator offers increased capacity factor and annual energy production.

"The development and running of this demonstrator is an interesting opportunity to test some of our hypotheses on the hybrid power plants of the future. Furthermore, it gives us an opportunity to explore wind and solar technology synergies in close collaboration with Vestas," says Bautista Rodriguez, technical director at EDPR.

For the project, Vestas has upgraded the technical specifications of the turbine's controllers, converters and design as well as installed new hardware. By connecting wind and solar through the turbine's power electronics and utilising its full-scale converter, the number of converters is reduced, contributing to lower equipment costs and thus cost of energy.