Impact of wind energy systems on power system dynamics and stability

With large wind energy integration into power systems, wind farms begin to influence power systems in a much more significant manner. As wind energy systems utilize different generator technologies from the one utilized in the conventional power plants, the steady-state, transient and small-signal dynamics, as well as, power system stability will thus be significantly affected. The impact of wind energy systems on the power system dynamics and stability is thus of practical importance. As there is a significant increase in installation of wind turbines equipped with doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG) in recent years, a dynamic model of the DFIG wind turbine is firstly developed in this thesis. The model is validated against field measurement data, and the validation gives confidence about the accuracy and applicability of the developed model. DFIG wind farms consist of tens to hundreds of identical DFIG wind turbines increasing the complexity of the wind farm model and simulation time. A novel aggregation technique is developed in this thesis that incorporates a multiplication factor, namely mechanical torque compensation factor (MTCF), to the mechanical torque of the full aggregated wind farm model. The MTCF is initially constructed to approximate a Gaussian function by using fuzzy logic method. By optimizing the MTCF on a trial and error basis, less than 10 percent discrepancy is then achieved between the proposed aggregated model and the complete model. The proposed aggregation technique is then applied to a 120 MVA offshore wind farm comprising of 72 DFIG wind turbines and shows higher accuracy in approximating the wind farm dynamics as it appears at the point of common coupling (PCC) as compared to the full aggregated model. The proposed aggregated model computes faster than the complete wind farm model by 90.3 percent during normal operations and 87 percent during grid disturbances. To overcome the adverse effects due to the fluctuating nature of wind, two wind power smoothing methods are proposed using a fuzzy logic pitch angle controller for a smooth performance with a minimum drop in output power. One method performs partial smoothing with only 4.74 percent drop in the output power while the other method offers complete smoothing with a 8.28 percent drop in output power. The impact of wind energy integration on power system transient stability (PSTS) is studied quantitatively with the transient energy margin (TEM), which is calculated through the evaluation of the transient energy function (TEF). This study is carried out in two ways in the thesis. One is to analyse the impact of transient fault on the DFIG wind turbine as compared to SGs for different factors, like the fault clearing time, the grid coupling, the inertia constant and the voltage sag. The study reveals that transient stability of the DFIG wind turbine is hardly affected by the grid coupling, the inertia constant and the generator terminal voltage sag variations indicating its consistent transient performance within a wide range of these factors. The fault clearing time should be almost 11 percent faster for the system with the DFIG than the synchronous generator (SG). The other is to investigate the impact of the DFIG wind farm on the PSTS with the variation of different factors, which are the voltage sag, the fault clearing time, the load and the wind power penetration level. The study reveals that power systems integrated with DFIG wind farms are sensitive to transient events with high voltage sag, high fault clearing time, low load operation and high wind power penetration level. Machines at different locations individually possess distinct fault response and suffer from a large-scale power imbalance. As a result, reliable operation of DFIG wind farm integrated power systems demands upgraded equipment, such as advanced switchgear, fast breakers/isolators, efficient power reserve systems and advanced reactive power compensating device, etc.