A New Approach to Improve The Power Control of Wind Farms
Humans must transition to more sustainable energy sources to slow down climate change and stop its unfavorable effects. Therefore, engineers worldwide have been dealing with various technologies that can transform natural resources, such as sunshine, wind, and water, into electrical energy.
Renewable energy
Wind turbines, devices that can transform the wind’s kinetic energy into electricity, are among the promising and extensively applied sustainable energy solutions. Despite their advantageous attributes, the electrical grid of the majority of existing wind turbines and other alternative energy solutions can be dramatically unstable.
Therefore, several governments have started introducing legislation that forces wind turbine operators to provide ancillary grid services. These are essentially functions that help grid operators preserve a trusted flow of electricity, dealing with discrepancies between energy supply and demand.
Scientists at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) have lately developed a controller that can help manage the energy power of wind farms through what is known as “active power control.” This controller, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could help to improve the performance of wind farms, thus facilitating their implementation worldwide.
“The proposed design improves power monitoring stability and allows for a simple understanding, where each turbine is considered a pure time-delay system,” Jean Gonzalez Silva, Bart Matthijs Doekemeijer, Riccardo Ferrary, and Jan-Willem van Wingerden wrote in their paper.
To track the power of wind turbines, the researchers’ approach employs a closed-loop algorithm. This algorithm has a feedforward and a feedback loop. The first makes sure the tracking of power when turbines are not filled, while the latter monitors power when one, but not all, of the turbines, are saturated.
New wind farm controllers
Gonzales Silva and his colleagues assessed their controller in a collection of tests run on SOWFA, a high-fidelity wind plant simulator. They discovered that their approach enhanced the total active power tracking for the simulated wind farms substantially, increasing power production by as much as 15% more than a baseline approach.
“The paper looked into the control performance with different nominal power distributions in a fully waked condition and limited power availability,” the researchers explained in their paper. “Results show the improvement in power production acquired by closing the control loop, compared to greedy operation.”
The improvement in the total active power monitoring and power production of wind turbines highlighted by the scientists’ simulations indicates that their approach might help to improve the performance of real-world wind farms dramatically.
Nonetheless, the group likewise observed a series of undesirable small spikes and oscillations on the active power of their closed-loop solution. In their subsequent studies, they intend to try to devise a strategy to either eliminate or accommodate these oscillations to better their approach’s performance and reliability.
“Our future research will certainly elaborate smart time-varying distribution of the nominal active power by anticipating available power and consider designed constricted turbines due to faults and failures in the proposed APC solution,” the scientists wrote in their paper.
Read the original article on Tech Xplore.
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