6/23/2015
Session 2
Chung, M.Y.K.
Optimum wind farm layout, with the main emphasis on optimal cabling
With the climate change agenda high on the UK’s political consideration, the UK has
committed to produce 15% of energy from renewable sources by 2020 and a
significant proportion of that will be offshore wind – a capacity of 3.6GW in January
2014 is due to rapidly increase to around 15GW in 2020.
To ensure the cost of energy is kept as low and affordable as possible, studies
commissioned by the Carbon Trust indicated there are several feasible
improvements which should decrease the cost of energy to £100/MWh by 2020. One
of the means is to optimise wind farm layout and cabling, as well as increasing the
array voltage to 66kV. The latter offers scope to provide redundancy in the event of
an outage, as well as transferring double the amount of power with the same length
of cable.
This project aims to design and implement a Matlab program to compute the
optimum route along a 3D seabed profile, with the use of Clarke and Wright algorithm
with sweep clustering, using an existing geodesic toolbox to determine the optimum
path between turbines. Extra features such as resistive power loss and availability
calculations were also incorporated in order to provide a monetary value to each wind
farm layout.
Optimum wind farm layout, with the main emphasis on optimal cabling
Professor B.C. Pal