Wind Farm Layout Optimization

Positioning and layout of wind turbines inside a wind farm require some pretty cutting edge science like Computational Dynamics Modeling and Algorithms. While it sounds like a mouth full, these modeling and algorithms are critical for energy generation for a wind farm. In a wind farm only the front-row turbines get most of the blowing power of the wind, therefore generate the maximum energy, whereas the rest of the wind turbines inside the wind farm produce much less than the front-row (on the order of up to 70% less). This is because every wind turbines generate turbulent wakes downwind with slower winds , basically high turbulence results in lower power generation; Take another good look at the background, you can see the wake clouds from the front-row turbines are covering the back-row turbines, now that is the turbulent wake. Placing the turbines in a optimized "smart" layout, to minimize wake losses and maximize energy production, is therefore very important in wind farms. For a given area and a given number of turbines, there are hundreds of thousand possible layouts, depending on the spacing along and across the prevailing wind direction, the staggering of rows, and the angle between rows and columns; oh did we mention the all crazy complex terrain variation?? Identifying the optimal layout is really tough, because it requires today's most sophisticated computer simulations, called LES (Large-Eddy Simulation), which can take up to 45 days to determine the power generation of a single layout under a single wind direction. To make these analysis and simulation commercially relevant, one needs to analyze 100,000 possible layouts, use LES to do this analysis would take multiple lifetimes. Now, this is where HKF GoodWind comes in, we have developed a super duper computer software, which can identify multiple optimal wind farm layouts with accuracy comparable to that of today's most sophisticated LES models but much faster, instead of multiple lifetimes, we can do it in just a few hours, yessss!