Optimal wind farm sitting using high-resolution digital elevation models and randomized optimization

We investigate the problem of wind farm design in isolated mountainous areas. We first describe a remote sensing approach for the terrain reconstruction of complex terrains. We then employ a well--known evolutionary optimization algorithm to find the optimal wind farm layout. Although the algorithm has been efficiently used for off--shore or smooth on--shore areas, we show that its performance is significantly affected by the complex topography. Moreover, we illustrate how a priori information can be exploited to improve both the computational time and efficiency of the optimization algorithm