Sensitivity‐guided decision‐making for wind farm micro‐siting

This paper presents a quantitative risk assessment for design and development of a renewable energy system to support decision‐making among design alternatives. Throughout the decision‐making phases, resources are allocated among exploration and exploitation tasks to manage the uncertainties in design parameters and to adapt designs to new information for enhanced performance. The resource allocation problem is formulated as a sequential decision feedback loop for a quantitative analysis of exploration and exploitation trade‐offs. We support decision‐making by tracking the evolution of uncertainties, the sensitivity of design alternatives to the uncertainties, and the performance, reliability, and robustness of each design. This is achieved by analyzing the uncertainties in the wind resource, the turbine performance and operation, and the models that define the power curve and wake deficiency. Comparison of the performance, reliability, and robustness of aligned and staggered turbine layouts before and after wind assessment experiments aids in improving micro‐siting decisions. The results demonstrate that design decisions can be supported by efficiently allocating resources towards improved estimates of achievable design objectives and by quantitatively assessing the risk in meeting those objectives. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.