Session: 08-06-01 Integrated Design & Environmental Assessment of Floating Offshore Wind Systems

Submission Number: 176207

Wind Farm Design Under Uncertainty: Managing Unknown Neighboring Farm Effects 

Wind farm wakes can persist for tens of kilometers, impacting downstream wind farms. This "wind theft" is becoming an increasing concern for wind farm developers, where the wake effects of neighboring wind farms can significantly reduce project performance. There is currently little guidance in how to address this issue during the wind farm development process.

In this study, we develop an open-source framework for wind farm design and analysis under uncertainty in the characteristics of neighboring wind farms. We discuss different ways to characterize neighboring wind farm uncertainty and perform a formal sensitivity analysis to quantify the importance of neighboring wind farms' power density, construction date, and layout in the Danish energy island wind farm cluster. 

We find that neighboring wind farm construction time is a major driving factor of project performance. There is significant ambiguity in which probability densities to assign to the examined neighboring wind farm construction time uncertainties. To confront this, we include an analysis of one- and ten-year revenues under a range of pessimistic to optimistic neighboring wind farm build-out scenarios. The results are then interpreted in terms of dangers of being overly optimistic/pessimistic in the examined case study. 

Finally, we perform optimization under uncertainty of a target wind farm layout, given uncertainty in neighboring wind farm characteristics, using a stochastic gradient descent optimization algorithm, which allows for the consideration of an arbitrarily large number of uncertain variables during the design process. We quantify the value of the stochastic solution, which compares the optimized wind farm layout performance to a design assuming fixed neighboring wind farm characteristics. 

Presenting Author: Julian Quick Technical University of Denmark

Presenting Author Biography: Julian Quick is a researcher specializing in developing safe and robust deployment and control strategies for autonomous wind energy systems. He earned his PhD from the University of Colorado in 2022 and currently works as a researcher at the Technical University of Denmark. In his free time, he likes to cook, sail, and play music.

Authors:

Julian Quick Technical University of Denmark
Pierre Réthoré Technical University of Denmark
Liza Maak Technical University of Denmark
Priyank Maheshwari Total Energies