Formulations and methods for wind farm layout optimization

The use of wind energy in electricity generation around the world has increased steadily over the past few years as the world seeks to reduce the use of fossil fuels in response to concerns over climate change and air pollution. Utility scale wind power is generated at large wind farms with as many as a hundred wind turbines. The layout of turbines in the wind farm has important implications regarding maintenance costs, electrical infrastructure costs, and most importantly, wind farm power generation. The wind farm layout optimization problem seeks to find the optimal layout of turbines that minimizes power loss from placing turbines in the wake cones of upstream turbines. The problem has received plenty of attention from researchers, but there remains significant room for improvement in terms of dealing with non-convexity, use of heuristics, and robust layouts which are resistant to errors in wind predictions. The first part of this work proposes a novel mixed integer linear programming formulation that allows for unrestricted placement of turbines within the wind farm, while at the same time eliminating solution dependence on the initial layout common to other continuous formulations. The second part introduces a dual-decomposition method for getting a close bound on the optimal solutions to discrete formulations, thereby facilitating the use of heuristics by giving an objective estimate of solution quality. The final part presents a robust layout optimization formulation with minimal data requirements, as well as a modified greedy algorithm with feasibility guarantees for finding robust solutions.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Industrial Engineering

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2018

Author dc:creator

• Quan, Ning

Contributors dc:contributor

• Kim, Harrison
• Thurston, Deborah L.
• Ouyang, Yanfeng
• Ho, Koki

• wind farm layout
• layout optimization
• robust wind farm
• robust layout
• wind farm design
• wind farm optimization
• wind farm micro-siting
• turbine placement

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2018 Ning Quan

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101499

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/101499