Reducing computational effort in the calculation of annual energy produced in wind farms

Metaheuristic methods are commonly used in the optimization of wind farms by means of turbine micro-siting. The typical pattern search used by these methods to explore the solution space makes it necessary to repeatedly evaluate the objective function (and hence the annual energy produced by the wind plant under optimization) a large number of times. For each case, before evaluating energy production, it is necessary to calculate the wind speed deficit at the position of each turbine due to the wake effect: a very time-consuming task.