Wind tunnel experiments were performed to investigate the effects of downstream-facing winglets on the wake dynamics, power and thrust of a model wind turbine. Two similar turbines with and without winglets were operated under the same conditions. Results show an increase in the power and thrust coefficients of 8.2% and 15.0% for the wingletted case. A simple theoretical treatment of a two-turbine system suggests a possible positive tradeoff between increasing power and thrust coefficients at a wind farm scale. The higher thrust coefficient created a region of enhanced mean shear and turbulence in the outer portion of the wake. The winglets did not significantly change the tip-vortex strength, but higher levels of turbulence in the far wake decreased the tip-vortex strength. Because of the increased mean shear in the wingletted turbine’s wake, the Reynolds stresses were higher, potentially leading to a higher energy flux downstream.

Building upon a recent study that showed windbreaks to be effective in increasing the power output of a wind turbine, the potential of windbreaks in a large wind farm is explored using simplified formulations. A top-down boundary layer approach is combined with methods of estimating both the roughness effects of windbreaks and the induced inviscid speed-up for nearby turbines to investigate power production impact for several layouts of infinite wind farms. Results suggest that the negative impact of windbreak wakes for an infinite wind farm will outweigh the local inviscid speed-up for realistic inter-turbine spacings, with the break-even point expected at a spacing of ∼25 rotor diameters. However, the possibility that windbreaks may be applicable in finite and other wind farm configurations remains open. Inspection of the windbreak porosity reveals an impact on the magnitude of power perturbation, but not whether the change is positive or negative. Predictions from the boundary-layer approach are validated with power measurements from large-eddy simulations.

The dependence of temporal correlations in the power output of wind-turbine pairs on atmospheric stability is explored using theoretical arguments and wind-farm large-eddy simulations. For this purpose, a range of five distinct stability regimes, ranging from weakly stable to moderately convective, were investigated with the same aligned wind-farm layout used among simulations. The coherence spectrum between turbine pairs in each simulation was compared to theoretical predictions. We found with high statistical significance (p < 0.01) that higher levels of atmospheric instability lead to higher coherence between turbines, with wake motions reducing correlations up to 40%. This is attributed to higher dominance of atmospheric motions over wakes in strongly unstable flows. Good agreement resulted with the use of an empirical model for wake-added turbulence to predict the variation of turbine power coherence with ambient turbulence intensity (R${}^2$ = 0.82), though other empirical relations may be applicable. It was shown that improperly accounting for turbine–turbine correlations can substantially impact power variance estimates on the order of a factor of 4.