How to design a wind farm layout
Designing a wind farm is like getting married – compromise is essential.
Firstly, let’s define what we wish to accomplish. We wish to design and build a wind farm in a windy location, so that it will produce a lot of clean energy and give good returns. However, we must be careful to minimise the risk to flora and fauna, particularly birds. We have to minimise noise impacts and other nuisances. We must also be sensitive to the visual impacts of the wind farm. This last point is particularly tricky as some people think wind farms look great and others think they look awful. Either way, we have to be careful of this point and not locate the turbines in areas of great natural beauty. In addition to these items, we must choose a site that is close to the national
grid and we must choose high quality turbines. As with all large engineering projects, it is essential to consider the concerns of the landowners and the community in the area we are developing.
What are the key design decisions? We must decide the location of our wind farm, the number of turbines, the type and size of the machines and where exactly to put them. This is no easy process and may take several years to complete. It is worth noting the size of some of the wind farms planned for Ireland in coming years will be of the order of several hundred megawatts. In monetary terms, this puts them in roughly the same category as the new Aviva stadium and the LUAS interconnector.
The design process is complex and contains a mixture of environmental, social, ecological, geographic, commercial and technical elements. Often, these various concerns can be pulling in opposite directions. For example, we may want to locate a turbine on top of a hill which will be very windy. However, this location may have excessive visual impact. In this case, we will then move the turbine half way down the hill so that it is still quite windy, but has less of a visual impact. Another example may be that we have a good location for a turbine, but the noise impact on a nearby house is too high. In this case, we may choose an alternative machine or operate it in a reduced noise mode. These types of decisions are replicated many times over as we try to find the right balance between all the different components. So, like I say, compromise is essential.
Desmond Lalor is a Senior Wind Analyst with ESBI’s Wind Energy Solutions team.
