ABSTRACT Wind energy has become one of the most promising new energy resources. In the construction of offshore wind farms, the cable accounts for about 10% of the total investment, and the optimization of the cable layout is necessary for reducing the total cost of the wind farm. In this paper, we proposed a novel algorithm for the optimization of the cable layout of wind farms, which can consider the relationship between the cost of cable and the amount of its connected wind turbines. Mathematically, it is a dynamic minimum spanning tree (DMST) algorithm that can consider the dynamic changes of the edge weights during the optimization process. This feature makes it suitable for optimizing the cable layout and cable type of wind farms simultaneously, and the wind turbines can be reasonably clustered in consideration of the current‐carrying limit of the cables. In this paper, this algorithm was used to optimize the cable layout of two offshore wind farms, respectively. In the first case of the wind farms, the proposed method saved 5.08%, 2.07%, and 8.61% of the cable investment compared to the Prim algorithm, the traditional DMST algorithm, and the ant colony algorithms, respectively. In the second case of the wind farms, the proposed method saved correspondingly 8.12%, 8.12%, and 7.98% of the cable investment, respectively.
Huang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.