Large-scale Offshore Wind Farm Electrical Collector System Planning: A Mixed-Integer Linear Programming Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mixed-integer linear programming method for planning large-scale offshore wind farm electrical systems, optimizing substation siting and cabling to reduce costs and power losses efficiently.

Contribution

It applies power distribution planning techniques to offshore wind farm design, improving efficiency and reducing costs through a novel optimization approach.

Findings

Cables investment cost reduced by 23%

Power loss decreased by 44%

Calculation time significantly reduced

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a planning method for large-scale offshore wind farm (OWF) electrical collector system (ECS) based on mixed integer linear programming, in which the sizing and siting of offshore substations and the lines between wind turbines (WTs) are optimized. We found out that the problem is similar to power distribution system planning, where the topological constraints for distribution network expansion planning (DNEP) are applied to guarantee the radiality of ECS topology and accelerate the solving process. Case studies based on an OWF with 63 fixed-locations WTs demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method, in which the cost of ECS's investment on cables is reduced by 23%, power loss reduced by 44% compared with a conventional design, and the calculation time reduced with the help of the radiality constraint.