The main goal of the OPTIWIND project was to globally optimise the electrical interconnection of floating offshore wind farms, focusing on cost-efficient solutions. On the one hand, the export scheme was optimised, leading to optimal selection of reactive compensation devices to minimise the electrical losses with minimum additional expenditures. On the other hand, the inter-array grid was optimised in terms of LCOE by means of an algorithm (a PSO, Particle Swarm Optimisation) that selected the optimal connections between turbines and offshore substations, leading to reduced cable lengths and minimal electrical power losses.
The project held a final meeting in the Barcelona office of YouWind, the project coordinator. The results obtained by the different partners were presented, showing the achieved progress after a year and a half since it started in September 2022.
The Power Systems group, from IREC, contributed with the development and implementation of the inter-array optimisation algorithm as well as general support to the partners in energetic and electrical aspects. José I. Rapha, Sergi Vilajuana, Sina Montag, José L. Domínguez and Magnus D. Kallinger were the researchers involved in the project on behalf of IREC.
As a conclusion, it can be stated that the electrical optimisation of the floating offshore wind farms is a complex task that is worth undertaking because it reduces its costs and can even increase the power output. While simple algorithms may lead to near-optimal solutions, accurate scripts deliver better results at the only cost of few hours of code execution, which can result in hundreds of thousand of savings in large projects, for which the algorithms showed high efficiency.
The consortium is formed by YouWind, IREC and UPC.
With the support of ACCIÓ.
