Simulating wake losses of the Danish Energy Island wind farm cluster

Abstract

The increase in the number of installed offshore wind farms has led to clustering, where wind farm interaction can cause energy losses. The Danish government is planning an Energy Island in the North Sea consisting of ten 1 GW wind farms. The initial wind farm layout design from a consultant company (COWI) has reported a 5% annual energy production (AEP) wake loss based on a low-fidelity engineering wake model that is known to underestimate wind farm interaction. The present work employs higher-fidelity wake models based on Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and a mesoscale model, which predict higher AEP losses due to wind farm interaction; namely, between 8.6-10.1%. In addition, we investigate how a microscale model as RANS can be employed to simulate a large wind farm cluster efficiently, and we compare its results with mesoscale model simulations.