| dc.description.abstract | Offshore wind plays an important role in the transition to renewable energy sources. With technological advancements and maturation, floating offshore wind farms are becoming an economically viable option. However, reliability presents a significant challenge for these floating structures, especially as wind farms grow larger in size.
This work presents a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model for the inter-array cable layout in offshore wind farms, incorporating reliability considerations. Rather than imposing a specific topology on the cable layout, the model allows for the addition of redundant cables where profitable. The investment cost of cables is balanced against the potential mitigation of revenue losses from disconnected turbines. This is achieved by defining a set of states for the system. This set is defined such that the most likely state of the system is that all cables are available, in all other states exactly one cable is unavailable. The flow variables utilized in the model formulation are then defined for each state. And so power, or here thought of as flow, from each turbine, can take different paths to reach the OSS in each state. Thus redundant cables allow more flow to reach the OSS increasing profits as evaluated by the defined objective function. The model is applied to a small theoretical case and the real-life cases of Ormonde and Horns Rev 3. For low failure rates, the resulting layouts equal those obtained when imposing the radial layout. However, for higher failure rates the layouts obtained do not conform to the radial or closed-loop structures, and in most instances include even more redundant cables than the closed-loop structure. | |
