Power Smoothening Control of Wind Farms Based on Inertial Effect of Wind Turbine Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel strategy for attenuating the output power fluctuation of the wind farm (WF) in a range of tens of seconds delivered to the grid, where the kinetic energy caused by the large inertia of the wind turbine systems is utilized. A control scheme of the two-level structure is applied to control the wind farm, which consists of a supervisory control of the wind farm and individual wind turbine controls. The supervisory control generates the output power reference of the wind farm, which is filtered out from the available power extracted from the wind by a low-pass filter (LPF). A lead-lag compensator is used for compensating for the phase delay of the output power reference compared with the available power. By this control strategy, when the reference power is lower than the maximum available power, some of individual wind turbines are operated in the storing mode of the kinetic energy by increasing the turbine speeds. Then, these individual wind turbines release the kinetic power by reducing the turbine speed, when the power command is higher than the available power. In addition, the pitch angle control systems of the wind turbines are also employed to limit the turbine speed not higher than the limitation value during the storing mode of kinetic energy. For coordinating the de-rated operation of the WT and the storing or releasing modes of the kinetic energy, the output power fluctuations are reduced by about 20%. The PSCAD/EMTDC simulations have been carried out for a 10-MW wind farm equipped with the permanent-magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) to verify the validity of the proposed method.