A Novel and Efficient Hybrid Optimization Approach for Wind Farm Micro-siting

摘要

Due to increasing penetration of wind energy in the recent times, wind farm owners tend to udgenerate increasing amount of energy out oudf wind faudrms. In order to meet targets, many wind farms are udoperated with a layout of numerous turbines placed close to each other in a limited area leading to greater udenergy losses due to ‘wake effects’ instead of generating more power. To solve the probludem in the most udoptimal way, these turbines need to satisfy many other constraints such as topological constraints, udminimum allowable capacity factors, interud-udturbine distances etc. Existing methods to solve this complex udturbine placement problem typically audssume knowledge about the total number of turbines to be placed in udthe farm, which might be unrealistic. This study proposes a novel hybrid optimization methodology, a udcombination of evolutionary and clasudsical optimization approachesud, to simultaneously detudermine the udoptimum number of turbines to be placed in a wind farm along with their optimal locations. Application udof the proposed method on a representative case study yields 43% higher Annual Energy Production ud(AEP) than the results found by one of the exudisting methods.