CLUSTERDESIGN · A Toolbox for Offshore Wind Farm Cluster Design

Today, an offshore wind farm is merely a collection of wind turbines where the components of an offshore wind farm cluster are optimized but not the overall cluster. In the future, the best-performing wind farms will be designed with an integrated approach. For this purpose, design tools for offshore wind farm clusters must then yield for the overall optimum. This means they must integrate the cluster and grid connection design with new intelligent mechanisms for wind turbine, farm and cluster control already in the design phase.The objective of the project is to develop toolbox for such an integrated offshore wind farm clusters design. In line with the call this is achieved by combination of the following different design optimisation tools elements as advanced wake models, turbine load models, grid interconnection models and by incorporating the operation of the offshore clusters as a virtual offshore power plant. The consortium will depart from existing state of the art models that are further developed within the project.In parallel extensive measurements and data collection is carried out in order to validate the models, to calibrate and further improve them. Furthermore the developed control mechanisms for virtual offshore power plant operation will be tested in existing wind farms to verify that indeed an increase of the overall energy yield, a reduction of load on the single turbines and a flexible operation of the wind farm clusters is achieved.