Optimizing wind farm cable layout considering ditch sharing

Abstract

Wind power is becoming an important source of electrical energy production. In an onshore wind farm (WF), the electrical energy is collected at a substation from different wind turbines through electrical cables deployed over ground ditches. This work considers the WF layout design assuming that the substation location and all wind turbine locations are given, and a set of electrical cable types is available. The WF layout problem, taking into account its lifetime and technical constraints, involves selecting the cables to interconnect all wind turbines to the substation and the supporting ditches to minimize the initial investment cost plus the cost of the electrical energy that is lost on the cables over the lifetime of the WF. It is assumed that each ditch can deploy multiple cables, turning this problem into a more complex variant of previously addressed WF layout problems. This variant turns the problem best fitting to the real case and leads to substantial gains in the total cost of the solutions. The problem is defined as an integer linear programming model, which is then strengthened with different sets of valid inequalities. The models are tested with four WFs with up to 115 wind turbines. The computational experiments show that the optimal solutions can be computed with the proposed models for almost all cases. The largest WF was not solved to optimality, but the final relative gaps are small.

Offshore Wind Farm Layout Optimisation Considering Wake Effect and Power Losses

“…The best solution found was 0.0-1.4% higher than the optimal solution. [11] ILP Obtains the optimal solution of the problem. [13] PSO Does not guarantee finding the optimal solution.…”

“…Furthermore, the problem of simply minimising the infrastructure cost was addressed to evaluate the benefits of including the cost of energy losses. The same authors proposed other approaches for optimising the layout of onshore wind farms considering the energy losses and multiple substations [10] and, in another work [11], energy losses and duct sharing, which leads to significant savings.…”

Wind farm layout optimization under uncertainty

“…Three essential optimization tasks, turbine location, electrical cable routing, and foundation optimization, are analyzed in detail. Cerveira et al (2023) consider the onshore WF layout design, knowing the substation and WT location, aiming to minimize the initial investment cost plus the cost of electrical energy losses over the lifetime of the WF, considering that each trench can deploy multiple cables, turning this problem into a more complex variant of the WFLO problems previously addressed. This variant makes the problem most appropriate to the real case and leads to significant gains in the total cost of the solutions.…”

Energy Flows Optimization in a Renewable Energy Community with Storage Systems Integration

“…The results guarantee an investment payback period of around seven years, with huge savings across the system's useful life. In [3,4,5], the maximization of the profitability of wind generation is addressed, namely in the design of onshore wind farms minimizing the costs of installation and active and reactive power losses during the lifetime of the farm, considering one or several substations, with or without ditch sharing. The results show that the optimization model allows significant savings.…”