Design of Off-shore Wind Farm Power Transmission Lines

Abstract

This study aims to develop the design of offshore wind farm power (OWF) transmission lines, since the world tends to invest widely in OWF at large scale, due to the availability of sea water, good wind speed at sea and uniform wind speed profile. However, Middle East and North Africa countries abandoned investing in OWF installation as it is costly and time consuming, hence this study provides OWF installation timetable includes site selection, gaining installation permissions, installation stage and operation stage. OWF supply chain and basic components are demonstrated and studied. OWF historical accidents are gathered to avoid their occurrence in future in order to increase the reliance on OWF as a new power source, increase transmission efficiency and reduce power generation cost. The bottleneck of OWF installation is the transmission system design. Submarine cable installation and design are difficult process and costly. Consequently, this study focused on finding different installation techniques, equipments and precautions to improve the cable laying and burial efficiency in addition to improve the cable protection to reduce risks which could damage the cables. The cable's route selection criteria are introduced and emergency repair plan is set and its cost is studied. OWF transmission options are HVAC and HVDC. Accordingly, this study includes comparison between different transmission options also, comparison between different cable modeling techniques to identify the most accurate and simplest models which could help in studying the transmission system efficiency, in order to improve the power factor using the reactive power control The study is performed on proposed case study in Zafarana, Egypt and results are tabulated and simulated. Reliability assessment using analytic probability is applied to different OWF designs at different distances from shore and results are tabulated. Transmission system cost is optimized using stochastic probability for the proposed case studied and scenario tree is established for different transmission system design schemes and results are simulated. Finally, this study reveals that HVAC transmission limitations could be overcome by applying reactive power control, assessing the designed system reliability, optimizing the transmission losses and cost.