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.
By Wolfgang Schlez, Managing Director, ProPlanEn, UK