A clustering based wind farm collector system cable layout design

The goal of achieving 20% wind power penetration by 2030 in the US has stimulated the installation of large scale wind farms in recent years, both on-shore and off-shore. Collector systems consolidate the power generated by turbine units distributed over the geographical area of the wind farm to a substation from where the generated power is transmitted to the electric grid. Design of a wind farm collector system must take into consideration the economics and reliability of operation. Most modern day large scale wind farms consist of hundreds of wind turbines and are generally electrically connected in a radial feeder cable configuration or daisy chains. While these configurations are generally accepted as convention, not much research has been done to analyze other cable layout configurations. This paper proposes a clustering based algorithm for cable layout of a large scale wind power plant. Comparison of the proposed method with the radial feeder cable configuration shows that real power losses in collector system are lowered and greater reliability is achieved with the proposed design. An economic analysis has also been done to compare the cost of generated energy associated with the proposed design and the conventional configuration.