Active power control design for supporting grid frequency regulation in wind farms

Among renewable energy sources, wind power is expected to contribute a larger and rapidly growing portion of the world’s energy portfolio. However, the increased penetration of wind power into the power grid has challenged the reliable and stable operation of the grid. This motivates new opportunities in the design and development of novel control schemes capable of actively maintaining the necessary balance between power generation and load, which in turn regulates the grid frequencywhen plenty of winds are available. This paper presents two active power control schemes that are developed based on adaptive pole placement control and fuzzy gain-scheduled proportional-integral control approaches. The active power control is conducted collectively across a wind farm to provide rapid power response while maintaining safe structural loading on turbines’ components. The proposed active power control schemes are evaluated and compared by a series of simulations on an advanced wind farm benchmarkmodel in the presence of wind turbulences, measurement noises, and grid load variations. It is further demonstrated that the mentioned schemes are able to tolerate probable occurrence of sudden imbalance between generation and load due to relevant faults/failures in the wind farm or electric grid. © 2015 International Federation of Automatic Control . Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.