Offshore Wind Farm Layout Optimization Accounting for Participation to Secondary Reserve Markets

Abstract. Wind farm layout optimization usually aims at maximizing annual energy production by placing wind turbines in a strategic way to avoid wake losses. However, this might not lead to optimal profits because of the volatility of electricity prices. Moreover, with the growing unpredictability and variability of future power systems due to the increase of renewable electricity production, wind farm operators will have a more important role in balancing the system through participation to reserve markets. This study presents a new formulation for wind farm layout optimization where the objective function aims at maximizing revenues from both day-ahead and reserve markets. It uses stochastic gradient descent for the optimization and probabilistic forecasts for wind power and electricity prices. The new formulation is applied on a test case based on a real-life offshore wind farm in Belgium. An important conclusion is that annual profit is expected to increase in a significant way when accounting for participation to reserve markets, while exhibiting a lower supplied energy production. Moreover, layouts optimized for profit maximization with reserve participation lead to better yearly profits than when considering day-ahead market only in the objective function. Profits are also higher for the new methodology than when using the maximization of annual energy production, widely used in the literature, as objective function.