Optimal Configuration of Offshore Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine Farms

Due to the emergence of reducing the emission of pollutants, renewable energy sources have been increasingly employed worldwide. Vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) can provide a significant impact on renewable power generation owing to their advantages over the horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWTs). In this research, the optimal configuration of offshore wind farms consisting of H-type VAWTs is studied. The classical Jensen wake model is used to represent the influence of wake effect to downstream wind speed, which is a strongly nonlinear function of the input wind speed. Moreover, the annual average power generation of a VAWT wind farm is also a strongly nonlinear and nonconvex function of the wind speed, and hence, of the arrangement of VAWTs. As such, the overall optimization problem for maximizing the annual power generation of a VAWT wind farm is a nonlinear and nonconvex programming. To resolve this problem, the genetic algorithm (GA) is utilized. Simulations are then carried out with realistic wind speed data in two years in the Saikai city, Nagasaki prefecture, Japan, whose results show interesting configurations for VAWT wind farms.