A fast and effective algorithm to optimize the total number and placement of wind turbines

Wind turbine placement in wind farms is a nontrivial optimization problem primarily due to aerodynamic wake interaction between turbines. Moreover, in reality, there could be other constraints related to farm topology, capacity factors etc. that can potentially make the problem more constrained and complex. Existing problem formulations typically solve for optimal turbine locations directly while assuming that the total number of turbines in the farm is known. However, wind farm developers often do not know the best number of turbines to be placed in a farm. This paper proposes a novel map-based heuristic search procedure to simultaneously identify the optimal total number of turbines to be placed in the farm along with their placement.