Considering Landowner Participation in Wind Farm Layout Optimization

Abstract

Current wind farm layout optimization research assumes a continuous piece of land is readily available and focuses on advancing optimization methods. In reality, projects rely on landowners’ permission for success. When a viable site is identified, local residents are approached for permission to build turbines on their land, typically in exchange for monetary compensation. Landowners play a crucial role in the development process, and some land parcels are more important to the success of project than others. This paper relaxes the assumption that a continuous piece of land is available, developing a novel approach that includes a model of landowner participation rates. A genetic algorithm (GA) is adopted to solve the nonlinear constrained optimization problem, minimizing cost and maximizing power output. The optimization results show that, given a projected participation rate, we can identify the most crucial plots prior to the negotiation process with landowners. This will ultimately increase the efficiency of wind farm development.

Aesthetic Local Search of Wind Farm Layouts

“…The practical consequences of this are considerable, since less land can be used for the same or approximately the same efficiency. This may positively impact on both the cost of land (e.g., see Chen and McDonald [27]) and the effect on wildlife (e.g., see the survey on environmental implications of wind energy by Tabassum-Abbasi et al [6]). This finding also suggests that purely regular approaches (e.g., Neubert et al's [14]) may not be ideal solutions to this problem because such approaches distribute turbines uniformly across the layout without any chance of free space areas appearing.…”

A Review of Methodological Approaches for the Design and Optimization of Wind Farms

“…Land owners receive incomes (royalty fees) from renting their land and usually receive a percentage of the gross income generated by the project, and extra compensations if roads or other infrastructure are built on their terrain. Depending on the landowner's participation [54], a wind farm redesign could be required. The legal, leasing and planning application processes are not straightforward and may take a significant amount of time.…”

“…More than one third of the total reviewed works (representing more than 80% of the works that adopted the CoE as the wind farm performance metric) [28,54,55,84,137,138,161,181,219, considered the Mosetti's cost function, in which the total cost of the wind farm is assumed to be an exclusive function of the number of WTs (N) constituting the wind farm, as shown in Equation (10):…”

“…A major contribution, including three different sources of uncertainty within the scope of the WFDO problem, was proposed by Chen and MacDonald [54,138] in which uncertainties in land availability due to landowner participation, wind shear, and economies of scale costs-reduction were studied. Landowner participation was represented with an uncertain utility model of willingness-to-accept monetary compensation (i.e., a minimum annual compensation per MW installed in their lands).…”

“…In addition, the conclusions are commonly based on contrasts between pairs of factors that are usually in conflict. Only a few works were able to address the overall effects of including different factors [54][55][56]199,234,278,310]. Two general kinds of effects in the resultant wind farm layouts were observed; some factors (e.g., infrastructure costs) induce pressure to concentrate WTs in high dense irregular clusters within the wind farm area while other factors (e.g., wake effects, turbulence and noise) induce pressure to separate WTs.…”