Irregular-shape wind farm micro-siting optimization

Landscape constraints inevitably cause the irregularity of the shape or boundary of a wind farm, which was not fully considered in previous literature. In this paper, a single-boundary constraint model and a novel multi-boundary constraint model incorporated with ray intersection method are developed to quantify the irregular boundary constraint for wind farm micro-siting optimization. In order to obtain high-fidelity wind farm shape information, an edge detection algorithm is employed to extract wind farm contour data from digital maps, and an optimal polygonal approximation algorithm is applied to compress the contour data so as to make the computation of boundary constraints less time-consuming. Simulations of four commercial wind farms comprehensively demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed boundary constraint models and the significance of irregular-shape wind farm micro-siting optimization. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.