Wind farms are increasing in size to keep up with the increased demand for renewable energy. Larger wind farms, leads to more complex wind farm design problems for a designer. This study investigates the wind farm design process and compares computed and manual design approaches in order to find the best solution to the wind farm layout optimization problem.

In this study, the design process of a wind farm is described in detail based on the
experiences of two designers in order to get a clear view on the current state of wind farm designing. Different experiments were performed to compare a manual and a computed design approach for an offshore wind farm. It turned out that the computed designs led to a 1 % increase in energy capture compared to the manual designs. Further research is required to conclude that computed design approaches always lead to higher energy yields, however, it was found likely that the computed approach is the best method to solve the wind farm layout optimization problem. The main problem with the current available optimization software is that it cannot deal with all constraints. Therefore, optimizing a
wind farm design still requires some manual changes to fulfill all requirements for the project.