On the Impact of using Mixed Integer Programming Techniques on Real-world Offshore Wind Parks

Wind power is a leading technology in the transition to sustainable energy. Being a new and still more competitive field, it is of major interest to investigate new techniques to solve the design challenges involved. In this paper, we consider optimization of the inter-array cable routing for offshore wind farms, taking power losses into account. Since energy losses in a cable depend on the load (i.e. wind), cable losses are estimated by considering a possibly large number wind scenarios. In order to deal with different wind scenarios efficiently we used a precomputing strategy. The resulting optimization problem considers two objectives: minimizing immediate costs (CAPEX) and minimizing costs due to power losses. This makes it possible to perform various what-if analyses to evaluate the impact of different preferences to CAPEX versus reduction of power losses. Thanks to the close collaboration with a leading energy company, we have been able to report results on a set of real-world instances, based on six existing wind parks, studying the economical impact of considering power losses in the cable routing design phase.