Case Study: WindFarmDesigns achieves higher energy yield and major CO2 reductions with FICO Xpress Optimization

How WindFarmDesigns can reduce C02 emissions by over 20 million metric tons per year?

Markedslabben’s WindFarmDesigns is a Norwegian start‑up that tackled a decades‑old, highly combinatorial problem: how to place turbines in a wind farm to maximize energy yield while respecting turbine load constraints and other factors like wake interactions, noise and visual impact. Traditional tools used heuristics or genetic algorithms and required time‑consuming manual checks for load compliance, producing suboptimal layouts.

Using FICO Xpress Optimization, Markedslabben developed a formal optimization algorithm (MIP with iterative relaxation) that integrates load constraints and wake effects, is available via API, and supports flexible licensing. The solution improves energy yield and project profitability by 2%–5%, can cut layout development time by about 90%, and—if applied across new projects replacing coal—could reduce CO2 emissions by an estimated 20–50 million metric tons per year; it also won the Decision Management Award for Analytic Excellence.

WindFarmDesigns

Klaus Vogstad

Creator