Planning of the Wind Farm Distribution Network Using Heuristic Methods

The construction of the medium voltage collector network constitutes a considerable part of the overall costs of wind farms, which has motivated researches that aims to find the best topology of the electric network. This paper presents a new algorithm for the optimization of the medium voltage collector network of wind farms, including the determination of the topology between wind turbines and substations and the conductor sizing. The proposed method is based on a modified genetic algorithm. The proposed method was tested in wind farms and compared with published works. The results obtained prove the effectiveness of the method to design optimized architectures.