Optimal wind farm cabling

Wind farm cable length has a direct impact on the project cost, reliability and electrical losses. The optimum cable layout results in a lower unit cost of generating electricity offshore. This paper explores three cabling structures: the string structure, ring structures and multi-loop structure on a 3D seabed. The newly proposed multi-loop structure increases reliability and proves to be most economic when the failure rate and mean time to repair (MTTR) of cables are relatively high. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to find the optimal substation location that minimizes the overall cable distance