This paper presents an alternative design of wind turbine. Wind turbine design includes subsystem elements necessary to satisfy rigorous grid codes imposed by transmission system operators (TSOs). While the addition of these components assures compliance they have an impact on the overall reliability. A new approach which can be taken by the industry is to rethink the design of the turbines, in this paper we describe how wind turbine units could be simplified in order to bring manufacturing and maintenance costs down and increase reliability for a farm installation of multiple machines. Installations with single stand alone turbines have to meet the stringent regulations to satisfy grid codes requirement, however, in a "farm" like configuration, a different approach can be taken to make the farm compliant rather than each individual turbine. A description of a Simulink model for this farm configuration is given and data extracted from the simulation are analysed. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.