Obstacle-avoiding wind turbine placement for power-loss and wake-effect optimization

As finite energy resources are being consumed at fast rate than they can be replaced, renewable energy resources have drawn an extensive attention. Wind power development is one such example, which is growing significantly throughout the world. The main difficulty in wind power development is that wind turbines interfere with each other. The produced turbulence, known as wake effect, directly reduces the power generation. In addition, wirelength among wind turbines is not merely an economic factor, but also it decides power loss in the wind farm. Moreover, in reality, obstacles exist in the wind farm which is unavoidable, e.g., private land, lake and so on. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, none of the existing works consider wake effect, wirelength and obstacle-avoiding at the same time in the wind turbine placement problem. In this paper, we propose an analytical method to obtain the obstacle-avoiding placement of wind turbines optimizing both power loss and wake effect. Simulation results show that the wind power produced by our tool is similar to that by the industrial tool AWS OpenWind. Besides, our algorithm can reduce the wirelength and avoid obstacles successfully while finding the locations of wind turbines at the same time.