Wind Farm Layout Optimization and Its Application to Power System Reliability Analysis

Energy production of a wind farm is greatly affected by the wake-effect. In wind farm planning, it is essential to optimize the layout of wind turbine generators (WTGs) to alleviate the impact of wake-effect. This paper presents a new wind farm layout optimization model with an objective function to maximizing equivalent power of the wind farm. The proposed model incorporates the discrete joint probability distribution and characteristics of the wind, wind energy model, and the wake-effect. A particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to solve the optimization problem. In the optimization process, geometric analysis is conducted to determine the upstream WTGs and to calculate the horizontal and deviating distances among WTGs along the wind direction. An effective look-up table is constructed to directly determine the upstream/downstream WTGs. Then the optimal layout of a wind farm can be obtained. The proposed technique is applied to the wind farm layout optimization and the modified Roy Billinton Test System and IEEE Reliability Test System for reliability analysis of a generating system containing a wind farm. Simulation results demonstrate the validity and flexibility of the proposed technique in the layout optimization of WTGs in a wind farm.