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Comment by pwnna | Hacker News Reader

Not a wind turbine design engineer, but have done some fluid dynamics work. Thus, I'm not super familiar with what "wake blockage" is. A tentative look suggests that it might be similar to this work that I encountered[1], which suggests that by carefully positioning the wind turbines, one can extract more energy basically via the Bernoulli effect. Not sure if this is something of interest (or relevant) to you or not, but when I talked to some of the people working on that subject, it was implied to me that the manufacturers of wind turbine weren't interested in this, as it may decrease the number of wind turbines they can sell...

[1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/we.1806

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Interesting paper. When I refer to "wake blockage", think of the turbines in the middle of a huge grid of machines. The energy in incoming wind on any side of the farm is mostly extracted by the outer turbines. The inner turbines typically produce ~15-20% less energy due to this effect. Also, the wind hitting them is more turbulent/"dirty" as it recovers back to free-stream velocity behind the front row of machines, which can cause abnormal fatigue patterns.

That's definitely of interest to me, although I think that manufacturers are interested in it. Many manufacturers are very conservative with installed/environmental conditions of their production machines and want to minimize risks, instead of potentially alienating a developer by suggesting a scheme that could fatigue turbines or have other unintended consequences. If anything, the paper suggests to me that if adopted, manufacturers could sell even more turbines!

It's very possible that I misinterpreted the situation as effectively I got to this information through an overheard in discussions with other fluid dynamicists in school. I thought the information presented is kind of interesting, so I was surprised that no one continued to pursue this avenue of research. I'm glad that you find this interesting, perhaps this knowledge could be put to good use. Although, there may be there are other factors that I'm not aware of impacting the real world performance of this, as my specialty is not in wind turbines (not yet anyway).

FWIW, I know that Vestas has a department with a super computer dedicated to helping their customers choose optimal positions. And I also know of some recently commissioned large wind farms where the company behind explicitly mentioned wake optimizations. All the big turbine manufacturers are in an optimization race.

That's interesting to know. I didn't know that turbine manufactures are that state of the art. I mostly thought they are just building some sort of standard turbines and deploying it to different places like building houses. Evidently I'm mistaken. Perhaps I should investigate this area a bit further...

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