Wind farm layout optimization in complex terrain with CFD wakes: Paper presented at EWEA 2015, Europe's Premier Wind Energy Event, 17 - 20 November 2015, Paris, France

For a complex terrain site in Bahia, Brazil, 28 CFDRANS simulations were carried out, representing the relevant states of a wind rose with three degrees resolution. The resulting wind fields provide the background wind for the layout optimization of a wind farm with 64 wind turbines based on the AEP. The underlying wake model was deduced from CFD-RANS simulation results of an isolated actuator disk. We find that a hybrid optimization algorithm that combines genetic and gradient-based optimizers and subsequently increases the size of the wind farm yields good optimization results