Complex noise curtailment optimisation

Excited to share our work from Wind Europe Technology Workshop 2026!

During the conference, our colleague @thomas Sørensen presented our research on complex noise curtailment optimisation - a challenge every wind farm operator knows well:

How do you reduce noise emissions to permitted levels without sacrificing more energy yield than necessary?
The classic approach focuses solely on noise compliance.

We asked: can we do smarter?

Our production-conditioned algorithm (developed under the DECOWIND project with DTU, Siemens Gamesa, Force Technology, and EMD) showed that the answer is yes - significantly:

+5.2% AEP improvement in a uniform curtailment baseline vs. the reference algorithm

+8.2% AEP when adding wind speed/direction binning

Up to +7.6% AEP in a German TA-Lärm setup by avoiding costly shutdowns

We also explored how combining wind turbines with PV plants shifts the noise budget in ways that are not always intuitive - but are very solvable.

The core insight: treating curtailment as a production optimisation problem, not just a compliance checklist, pays off across every scenario we tested.

Thanks to our partners and Innovation Fund Denmark for supporting this work.