Towards transparent ANN wind turbine power curve models

Accurate wind turbine power curve models, which translate ambient conditions into turbine power output, are crucial for wind energy to scale and fulfil its proposed role in the global energy transition. Machine learning methods, in particular deep neural networks (DNNs), have shown significant advantages over parametric, physics-informed power curve modelling approaches. Nevertheless, they are often criticised as opaque black boxes with no physical understanding of the system they model, which hinders their application in practice. We apply Shapley values, a popular explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) method, to, for the first time, uncover and validate the strategies learned by DNNs from operational wind turbine data. Our findings show that the trend towards ever larger model architectures, driven by the focus on test-set performance, can result in physically implausible model strategies, similar to the Clever Hans effect observed in classification. We, therefore, call for a more prominent role of XAI methods in model selection and additionally offer a practical strategy to use model explanations for wind turbine condition monitoring.