A holistic approach for the optimization of offshore wind farm layouts considering cable layouts

Abstract

A wind farm, mainly, is composed of a set of turbines, one or more transmitters and a set of electrical cable connections between turbines and transmitters. Determination of turbine locations within the farm to maximize total power generation is called turbine location (TL) problem. Relative turbine positions affect the amount of overall energy because of wake effects. Determination of cable connections among turbines and transmitters to collect produced energy by turbines at transmitters is called cable layout (CL) problem. While TL problem is directly effective on the total energy production in the farm, CL problem indirectly affects the total energy due to the power losses. In the literature, TL and CL problems are solved sequentially where the layout found by solving of TL is used as an input of CL problem. To minimize wake effects in TL problem, distances between turbine pairs should be increased, however, as the distances are increased the cable cost increases in CL problem. A new mathematical model is developed to deal with simultaneously solving of TL and CL problems. A set of test instances are used to show the performance of the proposed model. The experiments show the practical use of the proposed holistic model.