Benchmarking of wind farm scale wake models in the EERA - DTOC project

Designing offshore wind farms next to existing or planned wind farm clusters has recently become a common practice in the North Sea. These types of projects face unprecedented challenges in term of wind energy siting. The currently ongoing European project FP7 EERA - DTOC (Design Tool for Offshore wind farm Clusters) is aiming at providing a new type of model work-flow to address this issue. The wake modeling part of the EERA - DTOC project is to improve the fundamental understanding of wind turbine wakes and modeling. One of these challenges is to create a new kind of wake modeling work-flow to combine wind farm (micro) and cluster (meso) scale wake models. For this purpose, a benchmark campaign is organized on the existing wind farm wake models available within the project, in order to identify which model would be the most appropriate for this coupling. A number of standardized wake cases for large offshore wind farms will be analyzed, which provide a reasonable range of conditions likely to be experienced in offshore wind farms. The systematic evaluation is based upon high - quality input data that is selected in the sister project IEA - Task 31 “WakeBench”.