Wind Farm Layout Optimization Considering Energy Generation and Noise Propagation

Wind farm design deals with the optimal placement of turbines in a wind farm. Past studies have focused on energymaximization, cost-minimization or revenue-maximization objectives. As land is more extensively exploited for onshore wind farms, wind farms are more likely to be in close proximity with human dwellings. Therefore governments, developers, and landowners have to be aware of wind farms’ environmental impacts. After considering land constraints due to environmental features, noise generation remains the main environmental/health concern for wind farm design. Therefore, noise generation is sometimes included in optimization models as a constraint. Here we present continuous-location models for layout optimization that take noise and energy as objective functions, in order to fully characterize the design and performance spaces of the optimal wind farm layout problem. Based on Jensen’s wake model and ISO-9613-2 noise calculations, we used singleand multiobjective genetic algorithms (NSGA-II) to solve the optimization problem. Preliminary results from the biobjective optimization model illustrate the trade-off between energy generation and noise production by identifying several key parts of Pareto frontiers. In addition, comparison of single-objective noise and energy optimization models show that the turbine layouts and the inter-turbine distance distributions are different when considering these objectives individually. The relevance of these results for wind farm layout designers is explored. INTRODUCTION Wind energy installation has experienced a tremendous increase in the past decade. The Canadian Wind Energy Association envisioned Canada to have 55 GW of wind energy installation by 2025, equivalent to 20% of the country’s energy needs [1]. The United States has seen annual growth between 5 and 10 GW since 2007, with a total installed capacity of 43GW through the 3 rd quarter of 2011 [2]. Wind energy is still facing resistance in North America due to health and environmental concerns. The government of Canada has published a series of reports regarding noise generation of wind farms [3–5]. Regardless of whether wind farm noise has negative health impact, it concerns both the developers and the residents near wind farms. Therefore noise is an important factor in wind farm design. Due to the aerodynamic nature of both energy capture and noise generation, these are usually competing factors, meaning that the more energy we capture with a given set of wind turbines, the more noise it might generate. Many aspects affect Proceedings of the ASME 2012 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE 2012 August 12-15, 2012, Chicago, IL, USA