Wind energy is currently one of the fastest-growing renewable energy sources in the world. For this reason, research on methods to render wind farms more energy efficient is reasonable. The optimization of wind turbine positions within wind farms makes the exploitation of wind energy more efficient and the wind farms more competitive with other energy resources. The investment costs alone for substation and electrical infrastructure for offshore wind farms run around 15–30% of the total investment costs of the project, which are considered high. Optimizing the substation location can reduce these costs, which also minimizes the overall cable length within the wind farm. In parallel, optimizing the cable routing can provide an additional benefit by finding the optimal grid network routing. In this article, the authors show the procedure on how to create an optimized wind farm already in the design phase using metaheuristic algorithms. Besides the optimization of wind turbine positions for more energy efficiency, the optimization methods of the substation location and the cable routing for the collector system to avoid cable losses are also presented.

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The current study aims to investigate and optimize the photovoltaic systems currently in operation at the University of Ibn Tofail in Kenitra, Morocco. The University has started already since 2017 to integrate photovoltaic systems in the form of carports with the objective to reduce the invoices for electricity supplied from the utility grid by at least around 40%. Until then, the University avoided selling the energy surplus to the local electricity provider due to complicated bureaucratic regulations. However, due to the new law on renewable energy adopted by the Moroccan government in November 2021, it will be possible for private households and public service buildings to sell the entire excess of energy produced by renewable energy systems instead of only 20% of the surplus according to the previous law 13-09. For this purpose, this research project seeks to verify whether an expansion of the available photovoltaic installations and the sale of the energy surplus is worthwhile or not. This research work has been done with the optimization software HOMER Pro and presents the obtained optimized results and proposals of two new scenarios in comparison to already existing photovoltaic arrays.