Evaluation of wind farm layouts

Paper in proceeding, 2004

In this paper, layouts of various large-scale wind farms, using both AC as well as DC, are investigated. The criteria in this investigation is the energy production cost. The energy production cost is defined as the total investment cost divided with the total energy production of the wind farm. To determine the energy production and the total investment cost, loss and cost models for the components in the wind farm are used (the most important models are presented in this paper). Of the investigated wind farm configurations, a wind farm with series connected DC wind turbines seems to have the best potential to give the lowest energy production cost, if the transmission distance is longer then 10-20km.