Introduction 2
© EMD International • www.emd.dk • windPRO 4.1 • September 2024
8a.1 Introduction
The Classical Optimizer in windPRO was released around year 2000. It has performed well for the tasks it was
designed to solve in the youth of the wind energy business. Since then, the development of the wind industry
has been fast, and many new requirements and challenges have become relevant. The size of wind farms and
the complexity of wind farm areas has increased dramatically. But also, the basis on which decisions are made
has matured, so that financial parameters such as costs of developing the farm and even the expectation for
future electricity prices should be included already in the windfarm design phase. In addition, new constraining
factors emerged that must be considered, such as wake effects from new wind turbines on existing wind turbines.
These developments have led to the need for a new windPRO Optimizer has been released in 2022 in windPRO
3.6. This was just the start of journey towards optimal design and operation of wind farms, and new features
have been integrated since into the new windPRO 4.0. Now, in addition to layout optimization, a long-awaited
noise curtailment optimization is offered, which is explained in detail in the Noise Curtailment Optimize manual.
The journey has not ended here; a wider range of cases will be supported, and more features will be included in
windPRO versions to come. If you experience limitations, have wishes or ideas please do not hesitate to reach
out and contact us – we are more than happy to listen to your input!
8a.1.1 Offshore Vs Onshore optimization
The New Optimizer in windPRO covers both onshore and offshore optimization. For offshore layouts the
geometry is not fixed, for this functionality the user is referred to as the Classical windPRO optimizer. The key
differences between onshore and offshore optimizations lie in the setup of the wake decay constant for the
annual energy production (AEP) calculation and in the model for calculating the cost of building the wind farm (if
costs are included in the objective). Hence, for pure optimizations of AEP there is no difference in the way that
the Optimizer operates. However, the performance will of course be guided by the user-provided information
such as WTG area and resource, which typically have distinct characteristics offshore and will be reflected in
the resulting optimization solutions. A new feature that is particularly useful for offshore applications that came
with the release of 4.0 is the integration of cost surfaces. This feature allows to better integrate costs that change
over space into the cost analysis. Further details of onshore and offshore cost models are given in section 8a.4.2.
8a.1.2 The GUI tree-structure and its levels: Site>WTG>Size>Run
A flexible graphical user interface (GUI) has been developed for the New Optimizer to accommodate several
different scenarios of use (see section 8a.2 for a description of the scenarios). This flexible GUI is represented
by a tree located on the left side of the Optimizer window. The tree will be gradually built-up by the user with the
required input information and with the different optimization scenarios run by the user. A lot of information needs
to be defined and setup prior to running the optimizations. This setup of pre-defined data and pre-calculated
information is a prerequisite for gaining sufficiently fast, yet accurate, optimization results.
Figure 1: The basic components and levels of the GUI tree: Site, WTG, Size and Run, with Run highlighted.
Building the tree, setting up and preparing the optimization, different information and decisions must be defined
and entered. When a level or item is selected and highlighted in the GUI tree (see Figure 1) the window on the
right shows the contents associated to this item, e.g. Site. Adding new levels to build the tree is done using the
three buttons below the tree. On the first occasion of adding a level the relevant button is highlighted in green.
Figure 2: Building the GUI tree for the optimization and adding levels. Next step is always highlighted in green.
The following sub-sections go through the setup that needs to be defined at each level of the GUI tree. While
setting up and running optimizations the main window of the Optimizer should be on the tab Setup & run.