Supervisor: Martin Greiner

Climate changes forces the world to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. In Denmark wind energy plays a crucial role in the green energy transition, since wind is very abundant. Currently, Denmark is the country with the largest share of wind energy in the world. Nearly half of the total Danish electricity demand is provided by wind energy. Moreover, the largest wind manufacturers in the world, Vestas and Siemens Gamesa, have roots in Denmark.

In this colloquium, simple and widely used modelling approaches of wind turbines and farms are presented. From a classical Betz model describing how a wind turbine is extracting kinetic energy from wind to how turbines standing in the wake of other turbines are affected in their power production according to the Jensen-Katic model.

Finally, methods of power output optimization of wind farms are discussed. One method is the sequential optimization of individual turbine operation within a wind farm. Another method is recent research on Coulomb optimization used for wind farm layout optimization. This method exploits an analogy to electrostatics where turbines are acting as charged particles in a Coulomb potential.