Harmonic Current Predictors for Wind Turbines

The harmonic impact caused by wind turbines should be carefully investigated before wind turbines are interconnected. However, the harmonic currents of wind turbines are not easily predicted due to the variations of wind speed. If the harmonic current outputs can be predicted accurately, the harmonic impact of wind turbines and wind farms for power grids can be analyzed efficiently. Therefore, this paper analyzes the harmonic current characteristics of wind turbines and investigates the feasibility of developing harmonic current predictors. Field measurement, data sorting, and analysis are conducted for wind turbines. Two harmonic current predictors are proposed based on the measured harmonic data. One is the Auto-Regressive and Moving Average (ARMA)-based harmonic current predictor, which can be used for real-time prediction. The other is the stochastic harmonic current predictor considering the probability density distributions of harmonic currents. It uses the measured harmonic data to establish the probability density distributions of harmonic currents at different wind speeds, and then uses them to implement a long-term harmonic current prediction. Test results use the measured data to validate the forecast ability of these two harmonic current predictors. The ARMA-based predictor obtains poor performance on some harmonic orders due to the stochastic characteristics of harmonic current caused by the variations of wind speed. Relatively, the prediction results of stochastic harmonic current predictor show that the harmonic currents of a wind turbine in long-term operation can be effectively analyzed by the established probability density distributions. Therefore, the proposed stochastic harmonic current predictor is helpful in OPEN ACCESS Energies 2013, 6 1315 predicting and analyzing the possible harmonic problems during the operation of wind turbines and wind farms.