Optimal power sharing of wind farms for frequency response

Abstract

This paper presents a uniform optimal power sharing strategy to coordinate the wind turbines (WTs) in a wind farm (WF) to provide occasional and continuous frequency response (FR). The coordination of WTs is formulated as an optimisation problem that takes into account the WT dynamics and tries to reduce the long term loss of energy yield caused by the provision of FR. This is achieved by maximising the total kinetic energy of the WF over time while reducing wear and tear of WTs. The proposed optimal power sharing strategy relies on periodic communication between each WT and a WF controller. Local linear approximations are employed to predict the system behaviour and the solution of the optimisation problem is obtained using the proposed centralised and/or distributed algorithm. The distributed algorithm only requires one‐way communication between the WF controller and local WTs, reducing the communication overheads. Simulation studies are carried out on a WF model to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The results show the strategy enables reduction of yield loss over previous methods while avoiding over torque operation during FR provision.