Wind farm layout optimization

The aim of this work was to produce a program to determine the optimum layout of wind turbines on real wind farm sites in complex terrain. That is, to obtain the maximum possible energy yield for a site. The program has been written and tested and achieves improvements in energy yield over sensibly designed initial layouts. The program incorporates all the natural, practical and planning constraints that normally apply to wind farm construction. It also uses basic turbine geometry and power information and takes into account the wind speed and direction distribution for the site, turbulence, the site topography, and the wake effects. The problem of finding the optimum layout translates into maximising a function containing many interacting variables and numerous discontinuities. The program uses a downhill simplex method to find the optimum layout as only the function needs to be calculated and not its derivative. The method has proved to be robust and has been used successfully on many real wind farm sites, resulting in layouts with increased predicted annual energy yields.