Designing High Performance Wind Farms
The relative importance of accurately modelling wake losses increases for large offshore wind farms, closely spaced wind farms, and wind farms in non-neutral atmospheric conditions. Wind farm wake losses of 20%, and uncertainties in excess of 5% in a pre-construction assessment, can make or break a wind farm project. High performance layouts significantly reduce wake losses and the associated uncertainties. A new generation of three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics wake models, designed to meet this challenge, has been developed and is now available to project developers.
![Figure 1. WakeBlaster simulation of Anholt Wind Farm for wind from 300 degrees (left). Right: wind farm wake loss per direction, comparison with Park2 model results. Significant differences are detected. Park2 is believed to be overestimating wake effects for wind from the southeast and northwest due to the empirical wake superposition used WakeBlaster Figure1](/images/stories/Features/2020Features/MarchAprilImages2020/WakeBlaster-Figure1.jpg)
By Wolfgang Schlez, Managing Director, ProPlanEn, UK