Optimal selection of AC cables for large scale offshore wind farms

The investment of large scale offshore wind farms is high in which the electrical system has a significant contribution to the total cost. As one of the key components, the cost of the connection cables affects the initial investment a lot. The development of cable manufacturing provides a vast choice space and a great opportunity to optimize the system cost while meets the operational requirements of the offshore wind farms and the connected power systems. In this paper, a new cost model for AC-cable is proposed and the optimal cable selection framework is established using the optimization platform in Matlab. A real offshore wind farm is chosen as the study case to demonstrate the proposed method. Furthermore, the optimization is also applied to an offshore wind farm under development. It can be observed from the results that the proposed optimal cable selection framework is an efficient and systematical way for the optimal selection of cables in large scale offshore wind farms.