Abstract
Abstract. The objective of this paper is to investigate the joint optimization of wind farm layout and wind farm control in terms of power production. A successful fulfilment of this goal requires the following: (1) an accurate and fast flow model, (2) selection of the minimum set of design parameters that rules or governs the problem, and (3) selection of an optimization algorithm with good scaling properties. For control of the individual wind farm turbines with the aim of wind farm production optimization, the two most obvious strategies are wake steering based on active wind turbine yaw control and wind turbine derating. The present investigation is limited to wind turbine derating. A high-speed linearized computational fluid dynamics (CFD) Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) solver models the flow field and the crucial wind turbine wake interactions inside the wind farm. The actuator disc method is used to model the wind turbines, and utilizing an aerodynamic model, the design space of the optimization problem is reduced to only three variables per turbine – two geometric and one carefully selected variable specifying the individual wind turbine derating setting for each mean wind speed and direction. The full design space is spanned by these (2N+NdNsN) parameters, where N is the number of wind farm turbines, Nd is the number of direction bins, and Ns is the number of mean wind speed bins. This design space is decomposed into two subsets, which in turn define a nested set of optimization problems to achieve a significantly faster optimization procedure compared to a direct optimization based on the full design space. Following a simplistic sanity check of the platform functionality regarding wind farm layout and control optimization, the capability of the developed optimization platform is demonstrated on a Swedish offshore wind farm. For this particular wind farm, the analysis demonstrates that the expected annual energy production can be increased by 4 % by integrating the wind farm control into the design of the wind farm layout, which is 1.2 % higher than what is achieved by optimizing the layout only.
Highlights
The large-scale global deployment of wind energy is highly dependent on the cost of energy (COE), i.e. the profit of a wind power plant (WPP) over its lifetime as seen from an investor’s perspective
For this particular wind farm, the analysis demonstrates that the expected annual energy production can be increased by 4 % by integrating the wind farm control into the design of the wind farm layout, which is 1.2 % higher than what is achieved by optimizing the layout only
This paper describes a platform for integrated WPP layout and derating-based WPP control optimization
Summary
The large-scale global deployment of wind energy is highly dependent on the cost of energy (COE), i.e. the profit of a wind power plant (WPP) over its lifetime as seen from an investor’s perspective. Fleming et al (2016) and Gebraad et al (2017) studied the optimization of layout and active wake control in terms of WT yaw-dictated wake deflection on a WPP with 60 WTs. No attempt was made to compare the full integrated system design approach with a sequential approach, in which first the layout was optimized and subsequently, the WPP control Such a comparison would have contributed to quantification of the coupling terms, elaborated by Fathy et al (2001), and, in the case of weak coupling, facilitated a reduction in the computational efforts needed to perform the system design optimization.
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