162. SIMULTANEOUS OPTIMIZATION OF ELECTRICAL INTERCONNECTION CONFIGURATION IN ONSHORE WIND FIELDS
Abstract
The electrical interconnection cost of onshore wind fields (WF) is a part that should not be neglected in the design of WF. In order to minimize the investment and operational costs, this paper pro- poses an optimization formulation to find the optimal electrical interconnection configuration of wind tur- bines (WTs), simultaneously. This simultaneous minimization of total trenching length is done during а WF layout optimization by application of evolutional algorithm. In this paper, an algorithm is considered to comprehensively assess the optimal interconnection layout of the WTs. The interconnections are consid- erable fraction of the overall design cost of the WF. The optimal electrical interconnection design obtained by an algorithm with implemented Euclidean Minimum Spanning Tree method, corresponds to a lower cost and coupled with the technological developments can help policy makers and WF developers increase the use of onshore wind energy as a feasible unlimited renewable source of electrical energy