BENCHMARKING OF WIND FARM SCALE WAKE MODELS IN THE EERA - DTOC PROJECT

Designing offshore wind farms next to existing or planned wind farm clusters has recently become a common practice in the North Sea. These types of projects face unprecedented challenges in term of wind energy siting. The currently ongoing European project FP7 EERA DTOC (Design Tool for Offshore wind farm Clusters) is aiming at providing a new type of model work-flow to address this issue. The wake modeling part of the EERA - DTOC project is to improve the fundamental understanding of wind turbine wakes and modeling. One of these challenges is to create a new kind of wake modeling work-flow to combine wind farm (micro) and cluster (meso) scale wake models. For this purpose, a benchmark campaign is organized on the existing wind farm wake models available within the project, in order to identify which model would be the most appropriate for this coupling. A number of standardized wake cases for large offshore wind farms will be analyzed, which provide a reasonable range of conditions likely to be experienced in offshore wind farms. The systematic evaluation is based upon high quality input data that is selected in the sister project IEA - Task 31 “WakeBench”.