On the Effect of Turbine-Specific Mooring System Design on Floating Offshore Wind Farm Layout Optimization

Floating offshore wind farms enable energy harvesting in deep waters where bottom-fixed foundations become economically infeasible. Reducing costs while maximizing energy production is essential to achieve competitiveness with other renewables. Wind farm layout optimization is routinely performed to minimize the levelized cost of energy, but it can be substantially improved through site-specific design choices. In particular, mooring system design is often neglected or treated in a simplified manner. This work proposes an offshore wind farm layout optimization framework that explicitly accounts for water depth–dependent mooring system design at the turbine level. Turbine positions are optimized using a genetic algorithm to minimize the levelized cost of energy while considering wake interactions and mooring system capital expenditure. Mooring configurations are derived from precomputed optimal solutions for a discrete set of water depths and motion constraints, enabling the integration of detailed mooring physics and bottom-up cost modeling without prohibitive computational cost. The framework is applied to a case study representative of deep-water Mediterranean conditions. Results show that including mooring system design and cost significantly alters the optimal layout, driving turbine placement toward shallower regions while preserving energy production. Analysis of the optimized layout reveals depth-dependent transitions in mooring system configurations, consistently reflected in both technical characteristics and cost breakdowns. The proposed approach demonstrates that design-based, turbine-specific mooring modeling is essential for reliable techno-economic optimization of floating wind farms and provides a foundation for future investigations into coupled design problems, including shared mooring concepts.