EERA-DTOC

The European Energy Research Alliance (EERA) together with some high-impact industry partners addresses the call proposing an integrated and validated design tool combining the state-of-the-art wake, yield and electrical models available in the consortium, as a plug-in architecture with possibility for third party models. To decrease uncertainties around wind farm wake predictions, a small measurement campaign together with the new data available from the industry partners will enable better tuning, and eventually better modelling of the far-field of wind farm wakes. With the large amount of offshore wind farms to be built in the next years, clusters of wind farms will appear at favourable locations, like in the German Bight and Dogger Bank. Large arrays of floating wind farms planned near long-distance grid cables independent of water depth will also start to appear in the next years. The planning and design of these clusters pose new challenges with regards to the siting of the connected wind farms, the design of the interconnecting grid structure and the integration of the large amount of power into the electricity supply systems.

The concept of the EERA-DTOC project is to combine this expertise in a common integrated software tool for the optimised design of offshore wind farms and wind farm clusters acting as wind power plants. The only point less well known, due to the lack of good data so far, is the behaviour of the wind farm wake, in particular far-field wake. Therefore, a small measurement campaign is planned and collection of lidar data and high-resolution satellite images to get better data. Key industry actors working as end users of the software will help in the design of the tool, and will afterwards verify the performance of the tool using their own data and test cases.