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Wind resource assessments (WRA) are performed to estimate the energy yield with reliable accuracy. These analyses describe the technical feasibility and financial viability of a wind farm. Hence, the analyses are performed extensively because wind farms have high capital costs.
One of the crucial steps in WRA is designing layouts of wind farms. One would primarily have to study metrological orographic and environmental factors, wind turbines models that are available in the market and economic factors before starting to design process. The most widely used technique in academia and the commercial industry, is generating layouts using an optimisation algorithm. This framework typically has a small number of design variables formulated in the objective function which is then optimised to either maximize energy production or minimize cost of energy. However, designing an optimal wind farm layout is a challenging task due to the complex interactions between wind turbines and the environment, not all of which can be quantified within the optimiser. Optimisation involves high computational time and the resulting layouts are dependent to input assumptions, making them slow to run and prone to becoming out-dated.
This study proposes a rules-based workflow which makes overcomes the shortcoming of optimisation and makes the layout of wind farms fast and repeatable. The approach has been undertaken for a number of sites to demonstrate how sensitivity analyses on the number of turbines, turbine spacing constraints and other parameters can be undertaken. This study shows that it is possible to generate robust layouts which are deterministic in nature more quickly and efficiently than a traditional optimiser.
