Combining worlds of project development and data science
Sideshore Technology brings together the worlds of offshore wind project development and high-performance numerical optimisation to create optimal wind farm layouts.
Wind farm layouts are often designed using a simplistic iterative process, where the turbines are arranged in regular grids with a fixed orientation relative to the prevailing wind direction. The array is designed based on engineering judgement by yield specialists. The detailed wake fields within the wind farm and the impact on other cost drivers are not taken into consideration.
Indeed, the dominant cost driver is the wake generated by the turbine rotors, but water depth and soil conditions can have a significant impact on the foundation and cable costs as well. Full optimisation of the turbine positions requires not only insight into the cost drivers across all the relevant wind farm elements, but also a model which links all these elements together.
And this is exactly what Sideshore Technology does for our clients.
The Layout Doctor
With our clients, we define the cost drivers and boundary conditions across all packages, bring them together in a single model, and optimise the wind farm layout automatically using our proprietary optimisation techniques and software tool, the Layout Doctor.
The optimisation applies parallel computing methods run on GPUs and multicore CPUs. Our cost models are tailored to project specifics and include wakes, foundation cost, and seabed preparation costs. The optimisation also accounts for project boundary conditions such as minimum distances, exclusion zones, and avoiding excessive turbulence.
The resulting designs typically outperform “old fashioned” layouts with tens of millions of Euros saved over the lifetime of a wind farm.
