Exploring Wake Interaction for Frequency Control in Wind Farms

Abstract

The increasing integration of wind generation is accompanied with a growing concern about secure and reliable power system operation. Due to the intermittent nature of wind, the base-load units need to cycle significantly more than they were designed for, resulting in reduced life cycle and increased costs. Therefore, it is becoming necessary for wind turbines to take part in frequency control, and reduce the need for additional ancillary services provided by conventional generators. In this paper, we propose an optimised operation strategy for the wind farms. In this strategy, we maximise the kinetic energy of wind turbines by an optimal combination of the rotor speed and the pitch angle. We exploit the wake interaction in a wind farm, and de-load some of the up-wind turbines. We show that the kinetic energy accumulated in the rotating masses of the WTs can be increased compared to the base case without compromising efficiency of the wind farm. In a specific system, we show that by implementing this strategy, and injecting the stored kinetic energy of the WTs' rotors into the system during a frequency dip, we can delay the system frequency nadir up to 30 s.