A comprehensive review on enhancing wind turbine applications with advanced SCADA data analytics and practical insights

Abstract The aim of this study is to explore the potential and economic benefits of utilising Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) data to improve wind turbine operation and maintenance activities. The review identifies a gap in the current understanding of how to effectively use SCADA data in wind turbine applications. It emphasises the need for pre‐processing SCADA data to ensure data integrity by addressing outliers and employing interpolation techniques. Additionally, it highlights the challenges associated with early fault detection methods using SCADA data, including the development of physical models, data‐driven machine learning models, and statistical regression models. The review also recognises the limitations caused by the lack of public data from wind turbine developers and the imbalance between normal operation data samples and abnormal data samples, negatively impacting model accuracy. The key findings of the review demonstrate that SCADA data‐driven techniques can lead to significant improvements in wind turbine operations and maintenance. The application of data‐driven technologies based on SCADA data has proven effective in reducing operation and maintenance costs and enhancing wind power generation. Moreover, the development of robust decision support systems using SCADA data minimises the need for frequent maintenance interventions in offshore wind farms. To bridge the gap and further enhance wind turbine applications using SCADA data, several recommendations are provided. These include encouraging greater openness in sharing SCADA data to improve the robustness and accuracy of AI models, adopting transfer learning techniques to overcome the scarcity of quality datasets, establishing unified standards and taxonomies, and providing specialised resources such as software applications with interactive graphical user interfaces for easier storage, annotation, and analysis of SCADA data. The authors’ review paper identifies a gap in the current understanding of how to effectively utilise SCADA data in wind turbine applications. It emphasises the importance of pre‐processing SCADA data to ensure data integrity by addressing outliers and employing interpolation techniques. Furthermore, the authors highlight the challenges associated with early fault detection methods using SCADA data, including the development of physical models, data‐driven machine learning models, and statistical regression models.