Exploring a better turbine layout in vertically staggered wind farms

Vertical staggering of wind turbines can lead to an increased power production in the entrance region of a wind farm because downstream turbines are consequently outside the wakes of preceding turbines. We perform large eddy simulations of different vertically staggered wind farm configurations for which we keep the average turbine hub height the same. We find that the turbine power output in the entrance region of the wind farm is significantly higher when the first turbine row is elevated than when the first turbine row is lowered. The reason is that this allows the first high turbine row to fully benefit from the strong winds at a high elevation. In the fully developed region of the wind farm the power production of the vertically staggered wind farms is similar to the power production of the corresponding reference aligned wind farm, while the normalized power fluctuations can be significantly higher than in the reference wind farm.