Substation Location and Cable Connection Optimization of Onshore Wind Farms Using Minimum Spanning Tree Algorithm

Abstract

Due to the high investment cost, high maintenance costs, and vulnerability to climate impacts of offshore wind farm, large onshore wind farms are attracting more and more attention. Nowadays, the numbers and scale of onshore wind farms are increasing. For onshore wind farms whose the layout of wind turbines (WT) have been identified, optimizing cable connection can further reduce the investment cost. The cable connection layout and the substation location are determined together. Final cable connection should take the substation location into account to reduce the cable costs which occupy a large proportion in wind farm construction cost. The construction site of onshore wind farm is often not on the flat ground. To get more reasonable results, a method to get the final cable connection which optimized by minimum spanning tree is proposed in this paper under the consideration of the topographic conditions. At the same time, the position of the substation is also determined. The final results show that the cable connection obtained by this method is more economical.