Optimisation through conceptual variation of a baseline wind farm

The goal of the Dutch Offshore Wind Energy Converter (DOWEC) project is to develop concepts and technology in order to make large scale offshore wind energy economically feasible. A baseline wind farm of 480 MW is designed, to obtain reference cost estimates and performance parameters. The baseline showed that the marked reduction of the relative contribution of turbine investments with respect to onshore wind farms is still present at this scale. Several alternative concepts are designed and evaluated, aiming at one specific objective for each alternative. In the next step several concepts of the wind farm will be changed at the same time, focussing on improvement of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Serviceability.