Optimization a wind farm using particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Increasing the efficiency of a wind farm has been considered as a highly important factor in optimizing the wind energy issues recently. Wind farms are very important sectors for wind energy producing, whether they are standalones or connected to grid. For the same number of wind turbines and the same square meters of land, the method of placing wind turbines is going to be the most important issue in optimizing the wind farm. It means that the efficiency of system can be increased by selecting the proper places for the wind turbines in a wind park, for the same amount of investment. In this paper, for the first time a particle swarm optimization (PSO) method is utilized to optimize placing of wind turbines in a wind park. The location of each wind turbine could be freely adjusted within a predefined cell in order to maximize the generated energy using wind farm modeling. Extensive analysis has been carried out to prove that the proposed methodology has improved wind farm efficiency and extract more electrical power with respect to the total costs. Results from the methodology have proven that the efficiency and total output power of a wind park can be increased by using the PSO-based method as compared to the existing methods.