Evaluation of Wind Farm Layouts

Abstract

In this paper, layouts of various large-scale wind farms, using either AC or DC to transfer the generated power, are investigated. The criterion used to evaluate the different layouts is the energy production cost, which is defined as the total investment divided with the total energy production of the wind farm. To determine the energy production and the total investment, loss and cost models for the components in the wind farm are used and the most important ones are presented in this paper.The investigation shows that a wind farm with series connected DC wind turbines seems to have the best potential to give the lowest energy production cost, if the transmission distance is longer than 10–20 km.