Benchmarking Engineering Wake Models for Assessing Wind Farm Wakes Interaction

Abstract As the world transitions towards sustainable energy sources, offshore wind farms are one of the options under consideration in several countries. Some countries, for instance, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, the UK, and China, have already constructed multiple offshore wind farms. Other countries, such as the United States in North America and Brazil in South America, are making movements toward offshore wind. One potential problem is that offshore wind farm wakes can extend for longer distances than onshore, placing challenges on potential wake losses due to farm-to-farm interaction effects. This study proposes a farm-to-farm benchmark to complement ongoing experimental and computational efforts. We consider eight engineering wake models and 31 cases of pairs of existing offshore wind farms, totaling 248 simulations. The results varied according to the engineering wake model applied, alignment (or not) of neighboring wind farms with the prevailing wind direction, and wind turbine capacity. The range of AEP loss significantly varied between 0.075% and around 2.3% in the extreme cases.