Providing insight into what can be expected from Offshore Wind Farm Layout Optimisation

This is not yet another study into better modelling or optimiser selection for OWFLO. Instead, this study aims to provide insight into what performance can be expected from offshore wind farm layout optimisation(OWFLO) and to know when further optimising is not justifiable anymore. The study consists of three parts. All three parts make use of a referent. (The definition of the term'referent' as used here is given in the paper.) The first part uses the referent to find and understand the characteristics of the OWFLO problem. Wind farms with 9, 25 and 64 turbines have been optimised 100 times with the referent. The results show a small spread in the performance of the found optimised layouts, indicating that many local optima exist with similar performances in an OWFLO problem. The second part compares performances from optimised layouts with 25 turbines resulting from optimisations with alternative implementation choices, evaluated by the referent model. The difference in performance resulting from the alternative optimisers indicates that improvement of a state-of-the-art optimiser is not expected to lead to much better results. The third part explores the need to improve the analysis by adding a phenomenon currently not considered in OWFLO. The influence of neighbouring wind farms(NBWFs) on layout optimisation without including atmospheric stability is investigated. It is evident that adding NBWFs for accurate energy yield assessments is necessary. However, for layout optimisation, the benefit of including NBWFs is not apparent.