Otimização da rede coletora de média tensão de parques eólicos utilizando um algoritmo genético modificado

Abstract

Among the various sources of renewable energy, wind energy stands out as one of the most promising. Amid the energy crisis scenario in many countries, the demand growth, greater environmental awareness and greater demand for energy quality on the part of modern societies, wind energy has gained economic and strategic importance. In Brazil, wind projects are contracted by means of auctions through which are declared winners those projects that offer the lowest price for energy generated. This current model is responsible for increase competition and consequently instigate the search for optimization of the proposals. Considering this aspect, it is of great interest the development of computational tools to assist professionals to develop technical and economically viable projects in the planning stage, and preferably optimized. Wind farms are basically composed of wind turbines, transformers responsible for raise the output voltage of the turbines for adequate levels of distribution, medium voltage cables and substations. The construction of the medium voltage collector network (internal network), responsible for the interconnection of all wind turbines and substations, constitutes a considerable share of the overall costs, which has motivated many researchers to publish works that aim to find the best grid topology of the electrical network that, at the same time, minimizes costs and respects the technical criteria established, such as: radial configuration, connectivity, voltage variation in bus, current conduction maximum through the cable (overhead in the branches), among others. In view of these considerations, it is proposed in this paper a new solution algorithm to optimization of the medium voltage collector network of wind farms, comprising the determination of topology of connection between the turbines and substations and the sizing of conductors, based on the use of a modified genetic algorithm as optimization method. The objective of this methodology is to minimize the costs of acquisition of some equipment and energy losses over a planning horizon. The proposed method was tested on fictitious wind farms and the results show that the model developed can be used to design the optimized architecture of internal distribution network of wind farms.