Micro-siting optimization of a wind farm built in multiple phases

Abstract

A modern wind farm on a large scale can be partitioned into several areas and built up in multiple phases because of the limited initial budget, geographic availability, local policy and other factors. Wind farm micro-siting ignoring the wake effects caused by wind turbines built in a later phase is bound to lose the potential profit of the whole project. This paper proposes a micro-siting strategy that optimizes the layout of different farm areas synchronously for the largest profit of the whole wind farm. To properly assess the profit of the multi-phase wind farm project, the concept of net present value is accordingly augmented and used in the optimization process. Simulation results demonstrate that, although the produced energy of the wind farm designed by the proposed strategy decreases in the first few years, a substantial increment is added to the total profit of the whole project.