A Research on Wind Farm Micro-sitting Optimization in Complex Terrain

Many factors will affect the wind power output of a wind farm, such as wind turbines selection, layout method, grid connec tion, etc. However, the layout of a wind farm is one of most effective ways to improve wind energy utilization efficiency. There are some studies or software applied in the actual wind farm micro-sitting. Common software include WAsP, Windfarm, Windsim, Meteodyn WT, etc. WAsP from Danish Risø National Laboratory is th e most widely used software up to now, however WAsP itself has some drawback s, such as, WAsP can’t optimize the placement of wind turbines independently without the help of other necessary techniques and is proved to be not accurate enough from the practical data in complex terrain.

Abstract

Wind farm layout optimization in complex terrain is a pretty difficult issue for onshore wind farm. In this article, a novel optimization method is proposed to optimize the layout for wind farms in complex terrain. This method utilized Lissaman and Jensen wake models for taking the terrain height and the wake loss from th e upstream turbines into the wind turbine power output calculation. Wind direction is divided into sixteen sections, and the wind speed is processed using the Weibull distribution. The ob jective is to maximize the total wind farm power output and the free design variables are the wind turbines’ park coordinates which subject to the boundary and minimum distan ce conditions between two wind turbines. A Cross Particle Swarm Optimization (CPSO) method is developed and a pplied to optimize the layout for a certain wind farm case. Compared with the uniform and experience method, results show that the CPSO method has a higher optimal value, and could be used to optimize the actual wind farm micro-sitting engineering projects.