Combined layout and cable optimization of offshore wind farms

Davide Cazzaro, David Franz Koza and David Pisinger

European Journal of Operational Research, 2023, vol. 311, issue 1, 301-315

Abstract: Reducing wind energy costs is a crucial goal to promote renewable energy and reduce dependencies on fossil fuels, both to fight climate change and to increase energy independence. Two main optimization problems arise during the design of offshore wind farms: the Wind Farm Layout Optimization (WFLO) problem and the Wind Farm Cable Routing (WFCR) problem. The goal of WFLO is to find the optimal turbine locations within a given area to maximize revenues from energy production minus construction costs. The goal of WFCR is to minimize the costs of subsea cables that transfer the electricity produced by turbines. Traditionally, the two NP-hard problems have been studied separately and are solved sequentially, despite being strongly related. The output of WFLO defines the input to WFCR, and their goals are opposing: while larger distances between turbines have a positive effect on WFLO due to reduced wake losses, they negatively impact the cable costs in WFCR. Hence, we study the combined optimization problem, unifying the two problems. We propose a novel heuristic that uses a combined local search to modify solutions of WFLO and WFCR simultaneously. While the combined approach is more computationally demanding than the sequential approach, the proposed method solves industry-scale problems and improves up to 12 million Euro the Net Present Value (NPV) of wind parks, particularly when the energy density is low. Furthermore, the combined approach reduces the up-front investment costs by up to 10%, significantly reducing investment risks, and enabling a faster expansion of wind energy.

Keywords: OR in energy; Wind farm; Layout; Cable routing; Optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221723003442
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:311:y:2023:i:1:p:301-315

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2023.04.046

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().