Massive Simplification of the Wind Farm Layout Optimization Problem
Abstract. The wind farm layout optimization problem is notoriously difficult to solve because of the large number of design variables and extreme multimodality of the design space. Because of the multimodality of the space and often discontinuous models used in wind farm modeling, the wind industry is heavily dependent on gradient-free techniques for wind farm layout optimization. Unfortunately, the computational expense required with these methods scales poorly with increasing numbers of variables. Thus, many companies and researchers have been limited in the size of wind farms they can optimize. To solve these issues, we present the boundary-grid parameterization. This parameterization uses only five variables to define the layout of a wind farm with any number of turbines. For a 100 turbine wind farm, we show that optimizing the five variables of the boundary-grid method produces wind farms that perform within 0.5 % of farms where the location of each turbine is optimized individually, which requires 200 design variables. Our presented method unlocks the ability to optimize and study large wind farms, something that has been mostly infeasible in the past.