⚡️ Optimise and model the inter-array design in your onshore wind farm in Vind AI to take electrical losses and cable capex costs into account in the early phase planning.
The inter array cable algorithm connects turbines to substations while minimising the total cable length and selecting the best cable type to use from your cable library. When you have a complete inter-array cable design, it will automatically run a full power flow analysis in order to give you a valuable insight in the early phase planning, such as:
Insight into the expected losses due to inter-array cabling, and take these losses into account in the yield and LCoE analysis
Expected total cable length, with a break down on each cable type
Quickly assess and compare different cable designs for you park layout
The algorithm is designed to be easy to use and allow for quick iterations, to let you assess multiple parks or multiple design options in short time. If you want to make changes to the electrical design, you can either manually edit each cable segment or change the underlying road network and rerun the inter-array generation.
☝️ The inter-array cables onshore follows the internal roads in the park. That is why it is a requirement for generating inter-arrays that all turbines and substations are connected to the road network.
Algorithm Overview
These are the principles the algorithm is based on:
Always follows the road network: The main constraint in the inter-array cable algorithm is that the cables will always follow the road network. If a substation or a turbine is too far away from the road (more than 75 meters), it will not be taken into account.
Reduce total cable length: The cables will follow the road along the shortest path in the road network between the turbines and substations.
Choose the closest turbines to form a chain: The turbines closest to each other (along the road network) will be in the same chain and connected to the same substation. The maximum number of turbines in a chain is restricted by the capacity of the largest cable available.
Avoid parallel cables where possible: The algorithm will allow a tree structure (multiple cables going into the same turbine), in order to minimise total cable length and avoid parallel cables. It will also prioritise making the chains "complete" further away from the substation, to reduce number of parallel cables going into the substation.
Generation input parameters
You decide the overall voltage and which cable types you want the optimisation to consider. In order to reduce cost, the algorithm will select the smallest cable possible for each cable segment based on the total load going through.
If you know that the cables can handle more load in a short period of time, or don't want to maximise the load on the cable, you can adjust the rating factor to change the power rating of the cable types.
☝️ Note: The substation need to be connected to the road network in your park.
If you added the substation after generating roads, the easiest way of connecting a road to your substation is to create a "Manual" road by selecting the substation first, add a waypoint at the closest road and then connect to that waypoint.
Inter-arrays elements generated
You now have inter-array cables in your park, following the road network.
Zoom in to see parallel cables.
Select the cables to highlight them and better see the individual cables in the chain:
Statistics on inter-array cables
Open Electrical statistics on the right hand side or go into Dashboard to see more statistics about the cables generated. Hovering over the elements in the cable diagram highlights the corresponding element in the map above.
Cable diagram in Dashboard:
