Wind farm layout optimization with alignment constraints

Abstract. Wind farm layout optimization involves placing wind turbines in a defined domain to minimize the expected production losses due to wake effects within the wind farm. Because of navigational regulations, tenders for offshore wind farms often impose so-called alignment constraints, i.e., wind turbines must be located at the intersections of a parallelogram-made grid. The shape and orientation of these parallelograms are to be optimally determined to minimize wake losses. To the authors' knowledge and despite its practical interest, the wind farm layout optimization problem with alignment constraints has not been investigated in the literature. The contributions of this paper are twofold: the first is a dedicated optimization method to handle this problem, and the second is to provide a challenging benchmark based on open data for layout optimization with alignment constraints.