Designing of wind farm collector system (WFCS) which aggregates and transmits generated electric power by wind turbines (WTs) into the main grid has become more important with increasing size and capacity of wind farms. This paper presents a heuristic algorithm based on the combination of radial clustering algorithm and Prim’s algorithm to design the optimal collector system for an onshore wind farm. The objective of the proposed method is to minimize the total relative cost of the collector system branches, including the internal electric distribution network and the connecting sub-transmission/transmission line to the main grid. Applying this objective leads to a lower installation cost. The contribution of the paper is first proposing an approach to find the best location of the onshore wind farm’s substation and second presenting a heuristic algorithm to determine the best radial configuration of the WFCS. In the latter case, a combination of the proposed heuristic radial clustering method and the Prim’s algorithm is applied. A wind farm in southeast Iran, Khaf, is used in three scenarios to assess the effectiveness and performance of the proposed approach.

Keywords: Onshore wind farm, Collector system, Particle swarm optimization (PSO), Prim’s algorithm, Radial clustering