Optimization of Wind Farm Layout in Complex Terrain

Microscopic site selection for wind farms in complex terrain is a technological difficulty in the development of onshore wind farms. This paper presented a method for optimizing wind farm layout in complex terrain. This method employed Lissaman and Jensen wake models, took wind velocity distribution law and wake loss between different turbines into consideration and calculated the sheltering area effect of wake loss from upstream wind turbines on downstream wind turbines. Wind direction was divided into sixteen sections, and the wind speed was processed by the Weibull distribution. To calculate the output of each section, we used the wind speed distribution and its probability density as well as the wake loss between wind turbines for every section. The objective function is maximization of the whole wind farm's power output and the free variables are the wind turbines' coordinates which are subject to boundary conditions and minimum distance conditions. The improved genetic algorithm (GA) for real number coding was used to search the optimal result. Then the optimized result was compared to the result from the experienced layout method. Results show the advantages of the present method, and the limitations of the experienced method. © 2013 Chin. Soc. for Elec. Eng.