Optimizing Wind Turbine Deployment to Maximize Power
High-resolution simulations are conducted with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model in order to quantify downstream effects on atmospheric properties and ‘wind theft’ between wind turbine arrays and advance methods to improve the atmospheric physics parameterizations in WRF.
In 2016 nearly 89% of US wind farms were located within 40 km of another wind turbine (WT) array. Thus, WT array-array interactions (i.e. impacts from the wake of an upstream wind power plant) should be considered when locating new developments (i.e. new WT arrays) in order to properly characterize projected electrical power production from existing and planned developments.
We present multiple year-long simulations with real WT characteristics and locations and two different wind farm parameterizations to diagnose where discrepancies arise and what magnitude they have.