Benchmarking engineering wake models for farm-to-farm interactions

Abstract

Inter-farm wakes between offshore wind farms can cause a significant production loss at the downstream wind farm. We compare the power production at two wind farms that are separated by approximately 20 km to engineering model results provided by three different wind farm developers. Model inflow conditions were derived from the nacelle anemometry of the wake-creating wind farm and a mesoscale simulation. The comparison reveals that the model results show in general a good approximation of the wake losses, but underestimate the increase of losses in stable stability conditions. Here, specifically the measured wakes appear to be much wider than the modelled wakes.