A Two-Phase Approach for the Electrical Layout Optimization of the Offshore Wind Farms

Due to the current focus on offshore renewable energies worldwide, more capacity of them is expected in the future. The electrical layout design considerably affects overall implementation cost of these offshore power plants as well as the losses of energy inside the farms. Considering the increasing size of offshore wind farms, it is necessary to develop more robust and computationally efficient methods to design the electrical layout of these farms. In this work, a two-phase approach is proposed for the optimization of the electrical layout of the offshore wind farms; the proposed framework aims at the minimization of the ohmic losses and the cost of the cables. To solve the optimization problem, Simulated Annealing (SA) is applied in this study. A tool is also developed using Python programming language to implement the framework for the optimization of the electrical layout of the offshore farms. The proposed method is then applied to a farm with 100 turbines and an overall rated capacity of 1GW. The results approved the accuracy of the two-phase approach in finding the optimal electrical layout as well as the high efficiency in terms of the computational burden.