Wind Farm Spacing Calculator

Downwind and Crosswind Spacing are both set as multiples of Rotor Diameter, so a larger rotor pushes both distances out proportionally, and the land area each turbine occupies grows with the square of the rotor diameter. Doubling the rotor diameter roughly quadruples the footprint each turbine needs, which is why Maximum Turbines falls as Rotor Diameter increases even though a bigger rotor produces more power per machine.

More Farm Area does increase Maximum Turbines, since the total available area is divided by a fixed per-turbine footprint to get the count. The relationship isn't perfectly linear in practice, though, because the count is rounded down to a whole number of turbines -- on a small site, a modest increase in acreage may not be enough to fit one more full turbine until the area crosses the next whole-turbine threshold.

Increasing either multiplier reduces wake interference between turbines -- useful on sites with strong, persistent prevailing winds where downstream turbines would otherwise sit deep in an upwind turbine's wake -- at the cost of needing more land to reach the same Maximum Turbines. It's a direct trade-off between energy capture per turbine and how many turbines the site can hold.

A turbine wake is narrow but travels a long distance downwind, so turbines in the prevailing wind direction need much more separation (commonly cited at around 7 rotor diameters) to let the wake dissipate before reaching the next machine. Wake spreading sideways is far more limited, so crosswind neighbors can sit noticeably closer together (commonly cited at around 4 rotor diameters) without the same energy loss.