Development of engineering cost models for integrated design optimization of onshore and offshore wind farms

The goal of any multidisciplinary design optimization problem for wind power plants is to reduce the overall levelized cost of the energy. When it comes to designing a wind farm, one has to find the best combination of multiple parameters, such as turbine types, turbine dimensions and farm layout, to ensure the minimum cost. Clearly, since any design parameter may affect several cost items and performance indices of a farm, the most cost-effective solution should handle the mutual coupling among all design variables. For example, increasing the turbine spacing surely has a positive impact on energy production due to the minimization of wake losses, but, at the same time, may have a detrimental impact on the cost of cabling. In order to assist multidisciplinary design activities for wind farms and wind turbines, the present work is aimed at developing a tool for preliminary estimation of the levelized cost of energy of land- and sea-based wind farms. Such a tool is based on a modular architecture, which will ease the integration of the tool in a multi-level design framework. Each module of the tool implements one or more engineering models to estimate all cost items along with the annual energy production of the farm, starting from a few pieces of information related to turbine types and dimensions, farm geometry and wind conditions.