Advances in Wind Farm Layout Optimization

District of Namaacha in Maputo Province of Mozambique presents a high wind potential, with an average wind speed of around 7.5 m/s and huge open fields that are favourable to the installation of wind farms. However, in order to make better use of the wind potential, it is necessary to evaluate the operating conditions of the turbines and guide the independent power producers (IPPs) on how to efficiently use wind power. The investigation of the wind farm operating conditions is justified by the fact that the implementation of wind power systems is quite expensive, and therefore, it is imperative to find alternatives to reduce power losses and improve energy production. Taking into account the power needs in Mozambique, this project applied hybrid optimisation of multiple energy resources (HOMER) to size the capacity of the wind farm and the number of turbines that guarantee an adequate supply of power. Moreover, considering the topographic conditions of the site and the operational parameters of the turbines, the system advisor model (SAM) was applied to evaluate the performance of the Vestas V82-1.65 horizontal axis turbines and the system’s power output as a result of the wake effect. For any wind farm, it is evident that wind turbines’ wake effects significantly reduce the performance of wind farms. The paper seeks to design and examine the proper layout for practical placements of wind generators. Firstly, a survey on the Namaacha’s electricity demand was carried out in order to obtain the district’s daily load profile required to size the wind farm’s capacity. Secondly, with the previous knowledge that the operation of wind farms is affected by wake losses, different wake effect models applied by SAM were examined and the Eddy–Viscosity model was selected to perform the analysis. Three distinct layouts result from SAM optimisation, and the best one is recommended for wind turbines installation for maximising wind to energy generation. Although it is understood that the wake effect occurs on any wind farm, it is observed that wake losses can be minimised through the proper design of the wind generators’ placement layout. Therefore, any wind farm project should, from its layout, examine the optimal wind farm arrangement, which will depend on the wind speed, wind direction, turbine hub height, and other topographical characteristics of the area. In that context, considering the topographic and climate features of Mozambique, the study brings novelty in the way wind farms should be placed in the district and wake losses minimised. The study is based on a real assumption that the project can be implemented in the district, and thus, considering the wind farm’s capacity, the district’s energy needs could be met. The optimal transversal and longitudinal distances between turbines recommended are 8D_o and 10D_o, respectively, arranged according to layout 1, with wake losses of about 1.7%, land utilisation of about 6.46 Km², and power output estimated at 71.844 GWh per year. Full article

In recent years, wind farm layout optimization (WFLO) has been extendedly developed to address the minimization of turbine wake effects in a wind farm. Considering that increasing the degrees of freedom in the decision space can lead to more efficient solutions in an optimization problem, in this work the WFLO problem that grants total freedom to the wind farm area shape is addressed for the first time. We apply multi-objective optimization with the power output (PO) and the electricity cable length (CL) as objective functions in Horns Rev I (Denmark) via 13 different genetic algorithms: a traditionally used algorithm, a newly developed algorithm, and 11 hybridizations resulted from the two. Turbine wakes and their interactions in the wind farm are computed through the in-house Gaussian wake model. Results show that several of the new algorithms outperform NSGA-II. Length-unconstrained layouts provide up to 5.9% PO improvements against the baseline. When limited to 20 km long, the obtained layouts provide up to 2.4% PO increase and 62% CL decrease. These improvements are respectively 10 and 3 times bigger than previous results obtained with the fixed area. When deriving a localized utility function, the cost of energy is reduced up to 2.7% against the baseline. Full article

The focus of this study is under the auspices of China Steel Corporation, Taiwan, in carrying out the national energy policy of 2025 Non-Nuclear Home. Under this policy, an estimated 600 offshore wind turbines will be installed by 2025. In order to carry out the wind energy project effectively, a preliminary study must be conducted. In this article, we investigated the influence of the wake effect on the efficiency of the turbines’ layout in a windfarm. A distributed genetic algorithm is deployed to study the wind turbines’ layout in order to alleviate the detrimental wake effect. In the current stage of this research, the historical weather data of weather stations near the site of the 29th windfarm, Taiwan, were collected by Academia Sinica. Our wake effect resilient optimized windfarm showed superior performance over that of the conventional windfarm. Additionally, an operation cost minimization process is also demonstrated and implemented using an ant colony optimization algorithm to optimize the total length of the power-carrying interconnecting cables for the turbines inside the optimized windfarm. Full article