Collector cable systems are a critical component of a wind plant and play a vital role in efficiently delivering power from wind turbines to the grid. When planning a wind plant, an optimal design of the collector system will minimize electrical losses, minimize cable and trenching costs, and minimize substation configuration costs maximizing the return on investment.

GE’s Wind Collector Optimization Service provides customers with a comprehensive service from initial consultation to a completed and validated design. GE’s optimization service utilizes a leading-edge, proprietary design tool which includes multi-variable analysis to route and size a wind plant collector system. By utilizing the optimization software, GE can reduce the cost of a rationally designed collector system and provide potential savings of greater than 20% in design and build costs.

This service offering incorporates GE’s extensive experience in bringing over 4,000MW of renewable energy online coupled with over 40 years of substation EPC experience. Utilizing a proprietary algorithm that computes an optimized collector circuit design while balancing cost and power losses, GE’s Wind Collector Optimization Service provides customers with a collector system design which optimizes the cable routing and sizing and addresses the challenges with traditional design methods.

Faster Design Delivery GE offers more than 2 times faster design delivery through a 60%* reduction in design cycle time, in addition to engineering flexibility with near real-time design iterations.		Increased Efficiency Achieve efficiency in the design of cable sizes, trenching paths, and power losses leading to potential design & build cost savings of over 20%.		Lower Total Cost Optimize total cost of ownership based on calculated system cost and efficiency tradeoffs.
* GE commits to 2 day design cycle time on receipt of order