Economic optimization of design scheme of large-scale offshore wind farm’s collector system

The optimal planning of electrical collector system has a significant impact on the investment economy of large-scale and long-distance offshore wind farms (OWFs). Our paper analyzed the composition and characteristics of OWF’s collector system, as well as the economic composition factors of collector system. We built an economic mathematical model of the collector system with an objective function of lowest investment cost. Based on this model, an economic optimization combination algorithm was proposed. For fan layout, RFCM (Radial Fuzzy C-means) was adopted to carry out fuzzy clustering sharding. By this way, we obtained the submarine cable distribution path of the wind turbine cluster in sharding area. Next, the distribution path was optimized by prim algorithm. As a result, we found the minimum path of cable connection, which was also the most economical distribution topology. Calculation process showed that the dimensionality curse problem in optimization to the topological structure by exhaustive method can be solved by this combination algorithm. It provides a solution to the economic optimization of design scheme of large-scale OWF’s collector system in a simple and rapid manner. Finally, an example of Shandong peninsula north wind farm was given to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.