Reliability-Based Planning of Cable Layout for Offshore Wind Farm Electrical Collector System Considering Post-Fault Network Reconfiguration

TL;DR

This paper presents a reliability-based planning method for offshore wind farm cable layouts, using stochastic programming and post-fault reconfiguration to improve efficiency and robustness of electrical collector systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-stage stochastic programming model with a CPCI algorithm for efficient optimization of ECS layouts considering uncertainties and post-fault reconfiguration.

Findings

Validated on real-world OWFs, showing improved reliability.

Demonstrated the efficiency of the CPCI algorithm.

Confirmed the importance of optimizing ECS structures.

Abstract

The electrical collector system (ECS) plays a crucial role in determining the performance of offshore wind farms (OWFs). Existing research has predominantly restricted ECS cable layouts to conventional radial or ring structures and employed graph theory heuristics for solutions. However, both economic efficiency and reliability of the OWFs heavily depend on their ECS structure, and the optimal ECS cable layout often deviates from typical configurations. In this context, this paper introduces a novel reliability-based ECS cable layout planning method for large-scale OWFs, employing a two-stage stochastic programming approach to address uncertainties of wind power and contingencies. To enhance reliability, the model incorporates optimal post-fault network reconfiguration strategies by adjusting wind turbine power supply paths through link cables. To tackle computation challenges arising from numerous contingency scenarios, a customized progressive contingency incorporation (CPCI) framework is developed to solve the model with higher efficiency by iteratively identifying non-trivial scenarios and solving the simplified problems. The convergence and optimality are theoretically proven. Numerical tests on several real-world OWFs validate the necessity of fully optimizing ECS structures and demonstrate the efficiency of the CPCI algorithm.