Basics of Wind Farm Aerodynamics

Since more than two decades [10] wind wake aerodynamics is an established part of wind energy aerodynamics [7, 9]. The main objectives are to understand and model the interaction of large wind farms with the atmosphere. By Large Wind Farm we may refer to Hornsea 2 which has 1.6 GW rated power and covers an area of 462 \(\textrm{km}^2\) . As can be easily seen the power per unit area is only \(P_{wf} = 3.46\,\mathrm{W/m}^2\) which is obviously small (compared to the solar constant of 340 \(\mathrm{W/m}^2\) , when averaged over the whole earth and day) so improvements are highly desirable.