An Optimal Model-Based Control Technique to Improve Wind Farm Participation to Frequency Regulation

This paper presents a model-based control technique to provide the contribution of wind power generators to primary frequency regulation in electric power systems. Models of individual wind power generators and wind farm (WF) as a whole are presented and the proposed control strategy is detailed. It consists of a central controller, a central Kalman filter (KF), and some local KFs, one for each wind turbine. The central controller is disabled in normal operation conditions and its task is to set the power reference for each wind turbine, overwriting the local reference, when a disturbance occurs. Central KF is in charge of estimating the external load variation, while each local KF estimates wind speed and the wind turbine’s dynamical state. The key feature of this approach is that each wind turbine can react to grid disturbances in a different way, which depends on wind speed as seen by the wind turbine itself and by its dynamical conditions. Real wind data and a large WF connected to the grid in a dedicated simulation environment have been used to test the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.