Development of a Simulation-Based Optimization Method for Wind Farm Layout on Complex Terrain

Abstract

To improve the efficiency of wind power plants, multiple wind turbines must be placed in a way that generates a large amount of power while satisfying various constraints. For complex terrain such as mountainous regions in Japan, long simulation runs are required in order to calculate how much power is generated and determine whether the constraints are satisfied. Consequently, the manual processes and conventional simulation methods for deciding wind farm layouts are time-consuming. To automate and accelerate the process of wind farm placement, we propose a simulation-based optimization method for wind farm layout. In this method, simulation data are used to construct a prediction model, based on which the wind farm layout is then obtained by the optimization method. We conducted numerical experiments to evaluate our method and confirmed that it could find a wind farm layout that satisfied all given constraints and increased power generation by more than 30%, whereas the manual method could not find a layout that satisfied all the constraints in the same amount of time.