Study on Designing for Inner Grid of Offshore Wind Farm

Abstract

Wind power is one of the widely used renewableresources and it is connected to power system steadily. In recentyears, wind power is developed in the form of large-scale windfarm at offshore, which is composed of dozens or hundreds ofwind turbines. In inner grid of wind farm, wind turbines areconnected to each other through cable, and there are a widevariety of configurations depending on how to connect windturbines. Due to difficult and expensive construction activity atsea, the problem to connect optimally wind turbines is veryimportant. In order to solve the problem, this paper introduces amethodology based on the k-clustering algorithm, minimumspanning tree (MSP) algorithm and local search method.K-clustering is applied to divide wind turbines into k-groups,and MSP algorithm is used to link wind turbines in each groupwith the objective that total length of cables is minimized.Optimal configuration is determined by local search methodwhich explores diverse combinations depending on the numberof groups and the number of wind turbines in each group. Thecase studies show that the proposed methodology can be utilizedusefully for designing inner grid of offshore wind farm.